Could this remote Croatian island be the Med's best sailing break?

Sailor Pino Vojković is late for our rendezvous at the harbour of Komiža village. “I’ll be five minutes,” he promises, when I call. He arrives in 20. I can’t pretend I mind. It’s almost a decade since my last visit to Vis and I’d forgotten how beautiful Komiža is. The island has recently acquired a cachet as a bohemian bolthole, its reputation bolstered as the filming location of 2018’s Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. Why create movie sets that illustrate feel-good escapism when they’re ready-made on Vis?

Despite the Hollywood kudos, Croatia’s most distant inhabited island, 34 miles from Split by direct ferry, remains pleasantly low-key. On Komiža’s charming green-shuttered square, villagers are as garrulous as starlings over morning coffee. Stone houses jostle along the shore and a stubby castle guards the harbour where fisherfolk in sun-faded overalls sort nets. Romantic, nicely scruffy, Vis feels touched by magic.

Time on this island feels elastic. It stretches. Unspools. Maybe that’s why tour operator Intrepid named it among its annual ‘not hot’ list of 10 overlooked destinations to visit in 2026. And although tourism on the island remains small scale, international developers have started to take note.

It’s my desire to slow down and learn more about the island’s heritage that’s led me to meet Pino — founder of Alternatura tour company, which owns two of only four remaining falkuša sailing boats, the traditional wooden fishing vessels of Komiža. They were resurrected to run sailing trips for visitors, but also to rekindle an important facet of local history. When we meet beside them on the harbour, surrounded by modern boats, their swooping black hulls and sails swagged along varnished spars give the impression of something from The Odyssey.

A falkuša is an “endless poem”, Pino tells me as he prepares for sea; tightening the ropes that support the mast and loosening sail-ties. For centuries, the eight-metre sardine boats were the pride of the Adriatic. While other Mediterranean fishermen hugged the coast, those of Komiža sailed across open sea to claim the richest fishing grounds.

After the last falkuša sank in 1986 — replaced by more modern motorised, fibreglass boats — a replica was built by a Komiža research project, Cultural Association Ars Halieutica, for the 1998 World Fair in Lisbon. The reaction was astonishing. Within a year, Unesco had put the falkuša on its World Heritage List. Within 20 years, two more boats had been built.

That singularity of Vis — how it seems a separate world — explains much of the island’s appeal. Yet on an island tour earlier that day, history guide Marko Raduka had brought to life Vis’s pivotal role in the Adriatic. As we stood in front of a monastery, he explained how its curved rear wall was part of a Roman amphitheatre and told how ancient Greeks and Romans had crossed the Adriatic via Vis; Julius Caesar called it “the most distinguished in the region”. At a Georgian fort, Marko had restaged a British naval victory over Napoleon. And in tunnels that looked like a Bond villain’s lair, he’d described how Vis was a partisan stronghold in the Second World War, before becoming a Yugoslav naval base off-limits to tourism until 1989.

History continues to tug at me as we start to motor across Komiža harbour on our vessel. A man in a vest waves from his front door. A cliff wraps an arm around the bay ahead. Pino pauses off a shingle beach backed by a dated white hotel. This year, it will be transformed into a five-star luxury hotel. It’s a beautiful spot: a scimitar of pine-scrubbed shingle that arcs before a sea that shades from turquoise to cobalt blue.

Our sails go up beyond the harbour, opening up like spring flowers in a light breeze that pulls us towards the sea. Pino also runs popular speedboat trips to visit the Blue Cave at Biševo island, but says sailing is his passion. “When you sail, you’re in the moment, you’re in nature. It’s magnificent. And a falkuša is real Komiža heritage.”

We move at around 4mph; the sea chuckling, the boat’s varnished wood like gold in the sunshine. Komiža blurs behind us, a smudge of ivory stone and terracotta roofs beneath scrubby mountains. Occasionally, a speedboat races past. It strikes me that in an age that prizes speed, there’s something radical in travelling slowly. And it’s only made possibly thanks to Pino’s passion to safeguard the island’s falkuša heritage. Our wake is like an unfastening zip. The open sea ahead is a bolt of silk unrolled to the horizon.