For quiet
Maslina Resort
Stari Grad, Hvar · Croatia
A low huddle of timber pavilions folded into a pine forest above a quiet Hvar bay, a short walk from the oldest town in Croatia, which the Greeks founded and named Pharos.
Most of Hvar is given over to the summer noise of Hvar Town. Maslina sits at the other end of the island and the other end of the mood, above Maslinica Bay near Stari Grad, where olive terraces and Aleppo pines run down to the water. The architecture keeps its head down. Rather than one large block, the rooms are broken into low pavilions clad in timber, so the resort reads as part of the treeline rather than an object dropped onto it. Inside, the palette is pared back and earthy, terracotta stone, pale rattan, linen the colour of sand, rooms that ask very little of you. Eight of the suites have a private heated plunge pool; the rest share a long pool under the pines. There are fifty-three rooms, suites and villas in all, which is smaller than the setting makes it feel.
The kitchen works from the garden out. The Restaurant leans on Dalmatian produce and the resort's own organic plot, with fish from the channel and oil pressed from the island's olives, and it is best taken outside with the bay in front of you. The Bar handles the slow end of the evening, and down at the shore A Bay does the barefoot lunch. This is quiet, seasonal Adriatic cooking rather than fireworks, and the setting carries a good deal of it.
Stari Grad is the reason to come. Greeks from Paros landed here in 384 BC and laid out a grid of fields and dry-stone walls that is farmed to this day, the Stari Grad Plain, now under UNESCO and the most complete piece of ancient Greek land division left anywhere in the Mediterranean. Maslina puts you on its doorstep and pitches itself as the calm, low-impact side of Hvar, down to a spa, Pharomatiq, that borrows the town's old Greek name. Be clear about what it is. This is a wellness-minded resort with a full programme of yoga and sound baths, not a hideaway cottage, and Stari Grad trades the glamour of Hvar Town, twenty minutes west, for quiet. Come for the calm and the deep sense of place and it delivers both.
