Kornati

The Kornati are the densest island group in the Adriatic and among the emptiest: eighty-nine islands, islets and reefs inside the national park, about fifty square kilometres of land scattered through a hundred and sixty-six of sea. Almost none of it is green. The islands are Cretaceous limestone stripped by several thousand years of grazing and woodcutting down to rock, thin grass and drystone wall, and the effect from a boat is of a landscape with the vegetation subtracted — pale, ridged, and repeating to the horizon.

What makes the group geologically legible is that the islands are the drowned crests of parallel karst ridges, so they run in ranks along the same northwest–southeast grain as the mainland coast behind them. On their seaward flanks, where the outer chain faces the open Adriatic, those ridges break off in vertical cliffs the islanders call the krune — the crowns. The highest, on Mana and Klobučar, drop something over eighty metres straight into deep water, and they continue below it: the underwater cliffs run down further than the ones above the surface. Between the ranks the sea is shallow, clear and unusually still, which is what makes the archipelago the sailing ground it has become.

There are no permanent residents and no fresh water. Nearly all of the land is privately owned, and almost all of it by families from Murter, an island twenty kilometres northeast that has worked the Kornati as an outfield for centuries — coming across in season to tend olives, run sheep, and fish, and living in the low stone cottages that stand alone in the bays. That arrangement survived the park's declaration in 1980, and the park is managed as a landscape people still use rather than an emptied one; the institution that runs it is seated in Murter, not on any island. The park lost its northwestern portion in 1988, when Telašćica and its cliffs on Dugi Otok were split off and made a nature park under separate management — a real subtraction, and the reason older maps of Kornati look bigger than the present one.

What's worth knowing before you go

There is no scheduled ferry to the park and no accommodation beyond the stone cottages let by their owners. The realistic options are a day excursion from Murter, Zadar, Šibenik or Biograd, or your own boat with a park ticket bought in advance. Murter is the true gateway — connected to the mainland by a bridge at Tisno, and the place to arrange a cottage or a lift over. Late spring and September give the best light and the calmest water; the archipelago has no shade at all, which matters in August.

The connoisseur's version is to sleep on one of the islands. A handful of the Murter families let their cottages by the week, without electricity or running water beyond a rain cistern, and the point of the exercise is the night: no lights anywhere in the archipelago, the sea audible against limestone, and in the morning nobody within several kilometres.