Читать книгу The Islands of Croatia. 30 walks on 14 Adriatic islands онлайн

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Goli otok and Prvić, with storm clouds over Gorski kotar, from Kamenjak summit on Rab (Walk 5)

The Croatian coastline is spectacularly indented, with a total length of some 1777km over a distance of only around 526km (the latter figure measured as a straight line from the Slovenian to the Montenegrin border). This figure rises to 5835km when all the islands are included – the coastlines of the islands alone accounting for over 4000km of this figure. The coastline is rocky, with beaches made up of either rocks or, less frequently, pebbles. Fine shingle or true sandy beaches are rare, some of the best known – and consequently the most popular – being Zlatni rat (at Bol, on the island of Brač), Vela plaža (at Baška, on the island of Krk), Rajska plaža or ‘Paradise beach’ (at Lopar, on the island of Rab), Sv Duh (near Novalja, on Pag) and Saharun (on Dugi otok).

The islands are formed mainly of Cretaceous limestone – laid down on the seabed in the form of shells and other marine life when the Adriatic, along with the rest of this part of Central and Eastern Europe, was submerged beneath a shallow tropical sea some 66–145 million years ago. The Croatian Adriatic had become a coastal plain by the Pleistocene Era (2.5 million–11,700 years ago), with the gradual flooding of this coastal plain during the Holocene leading around 7000 years ago to the creation of the islands and the Adriatic Sea as we now know it.