We first came here during a Croatian island-hop in 2005, but little seems to have changed since that accidental discovery. Vis Town’s old facades — all white stone quarried on the distant island of Brac — still grace the waterfront. Elderly olive-skinned locals ornament the benches that line the promenade. In the cool of evening, families come out to swim from the wood-slat pontoons that protrude into the bay.
The apartment we return to after our hours by the sea is typical of this contented stasis. We stay in Kut, on the east edge of town in a room that verges right onto the sea, the wall beneath its shuttered windows lapped by the tide. Accommodation on Vis consists almost exclusively of sobes — self-contained apartments like this one, locally owned and rarely more than $100 a night. The one large hotel, Hotel Issa, a whitewashed carbuncle on the harbor’s western peninsula, is incongruous and unloved. With the island’s 1,000 rooms widely dispersed over an area similar in size to that of Manhattan, and with camping prohibited, there’s no overcrowding even in peak season.
“No one on Vis went out looking for tourism; the tourists found us,” explains Drazen Gazija, the owner of our sobe and a former president of the Vis tourist office. “Vis is the place to come if you want pomalo.” ‘“Pomalo” — the Dalmatian philosophy of doing things slowly, little by little — is a spirit that has seeped into the island’s very soil.
