The dry-stone vineyards
Thousands of walls dividing a rocky slope into squares.
Carsten Steger — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Zvone00 — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Zvone00 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Tomasz Józefczak — CC BY-SA 3.0
A small town on a round peninsula that is very nearly an island, and one of the most photographed spots on the Dalmatian coast from the air — houses filling the whole hill down to the waterline, with a church and its bell tower at the top. It genuinely **was an island** until the sixteenth century, when the inhabitants built a drawbridge and later filled the channel to make the present isthmus. The town''s name comes from *primostiti*, «to bridge». The reason it was built on an island is what it was built for: **protection from Ottoman raids** in the sixteenth century. It was walled and towered, and it stayed safe. Inland from the town lies a landscape no less remarkable: the **Primošten vineyards** — bare rocky slopes divided by thousands of dry-stone walls into small squares, each holding a little soil and a few vines. A photograph of these fields hangs at the **United Nations** headquarters in New York as an emblem of human labour against hard ground. Note: the beaches around it are pebble with pine shade, and among the best in the region.
Thousands of walls dividing a rocky slope into squares.
A round peninsula with houses falling to the water on every side.
With pine shade, among the best in the region.
Primošten — about 28 km south of Šibenik
They are a practical answer to impossible ground. There is **almost no soil** here and the slope is bare limestone, and the bora wind strips away anything unprotected. So over centuries the farmers did something crude and enormous: **they lifted the stones out of the ground by hand**, gathered what little soil remained into the gaps, and **built dry walls** without mortar around each small patch. The wall does three things at once: it holds the soil against erosion, it breaks the wind, and it stores the day''s heat and releases it to the vines at night. The result is a grid of thousands of cells, legible from the air. ⚠ The work is **entirely manual and cannot be mechanised**, which is why it is now in retreat — many patches are abandoned, and that makes the photograph at the UN a record as much as a celebration.
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