As it greets the sun every day on its way down and bathes in its fiery reflections, the westernmost village of Šolta – Maslinica shows off its beauty.
It is a fishing village, founded in the distant 1703 when the noble Marchi family requested permission from the Venetian governor to found a new village and build a castle with defence towers for the protection against pirates. At the time, the attacks by pirates were common and fierce, which was why the structure built by the Marchi brothers had to be solid and robust. Gradually, as the feeling of safety increased, family houses started being built next to the castle. They have been resisting the time and the bellicose human nature for centuries.

Looking at the Baroque castle surrounded by old stone houses, one can easily imagine the chimes of the alarm bells, the creaking of the oars from the galleys and the thunder of the defence cannons clashing with the roars of the cruel conquerors.

Today, however, it is impossible to settle your look in this peaceful Dalmatian paradise. Your eyes keep wandering from thick pine woods on the south side of the island, across the stone structures and old fishing houses in the harbour, all the way to the archipelago made up of seven islands that emerge from the azure Adriatic, breaking the rays of the western sun.

For centuries, the barren, dry and rugged Šolta was forcing its inhabitants to move around the world, breaking their bent backs and making them go to faraway lands, without ever looking back, where they became used to hard work and calloused hands and acquired wealth and reputation, mostly never returning to the rough native soil.

A long time ago, about 1700 years back, the emperor Diocletian paid a visit to Šolta and, in addition to his palace in Split, decided to build his fishpond on Šolta. According to a folk legend, the Illyrian queen Teuta also had her castle built in Senjska, one of the many bays of Šolta. Some didn’t care about Šolta’s roughness. Seeing only her virgin nature and enjoying the life of solitude, the father of the Croatian literature Marko Marulić sensually spoke:

You know I live on an island, not too afar,
Just nineteen kilometres away from the town
And if my friends want to keep me company,
Or wish to savour this blissful, country peace
One boat will hurriedly, in less than seven hours
Bring them over here, where I dwell alone.

Šolta, the island of fishermen and labourers, olives and vineyards, today is an inestimable open treasure chest where time has stopped long ago and where memories of an ancient, long forgotten Mediterranean are still preserved. When you walk through the old and narrow stone streets, looking at the grey roofs of the houses where labourers, fishermen and sailors still dry figs in their yards, absorbing the smell of the local dry wine that comes from the old taverns, all your senses are filled with this little Dalmatian paradise island.

Villages on the island are scattered like mischievous children, each with its story and its history.

The first settlements were founded far from the sea and the dangers that were lurking from it. Grohote, the oldest village, has been the centre of the community ever since 1811, while the archaeological find of a baptistery is an evidence of the process of the christianization of the island’s Illyrian - Romanian inhabitants in the 5th and 6th century. Today, Grohote is the natural, political and economic centre of the island.

Gornje, Srednje and Donje Selo (Upper, Middle and Lower Village) are typical Mediterranean island villages, which take us back to the remote past with their tortuous narrow streets and dry-stone walls. Many taverns in these villages store virgin olive oil, made according to procedures that haven’t changed for centuries and kept in equally old stone containers. It is widely known for its purity and quality, but for the purchase of it, you will have to trust the mainly pleasant and friendly local people.

Villages by the sea were inhabited much later. Very similar to the already described Maslinica is Stomorska, the village of hundred seas, whose cliffs fall steeply down into the sea disappearing in its azure where sailors, in their fantasies, used to return from to their native place.

Nečujam, once known as Vallis Surda – a deaf cove, the country home of the poets Marulić and Hektorović, today is a modern tourist centre.

Rogač, the main port of the island, represents a link that connects Šolta with Split today, but it also welcomes a lot of Split citizens who come here, tired and eager to rest, at the end of the working week. However, Rogač still holds memories of not too distant times when departures from Šolta were much more frequent than arrivals.