The straight tracks
Greek boundaries still walked and cycled.
Carsten Steger — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Falk2 — CC BY-SA 4.0 · August Dominus — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Argo Navis — CC BY-SA 4.0
An agricultural plain on the UNESCO list, and the reason is unusual: not a building or a ruin, but a **land division** still in use after **2,400 years**. In the fourth century BC, Greek settlers from the island of **Paros** founded the city of **Pharos** here (today''s Stari Grad) and divided the plain behind it on a strict geometric system: equal rectangles of about **180 by 900 metres**, separated by tracks and dry-stone walls. That division — the **chora** — still stands exactly as laid out: the same boundaries, the same tracks, the same walls, repaired generation after generation. And the land is **still farmed**, in vines and olives, as it was. So what you see is not the remains of an ancient system but **a living one**, continuous since roughly the time of Alexander the Great. Nothing preserved to this degree exists anywhere else in the Mediterranean world. The plain also holds small stone shelters (*trimi*) built by farmers, and ancient water cisterns. Note: **there is no visitor centre and no gate** — it is working countryside, walked or cycled along its tracks.
Greek boundaries still walked and cycled.
Small trimi built by farmers out in the fields.
Repaired generation after generation since roughly Alexander''s day.
Between Stari Grad and Jelsa, island of Hvar — about 20 km from Hvar Town
**Stari Grad** is the oldest town in Croatia — founded by Greeks in **384 BC** as Pharos and continuously inhabited since. It is **much quieter and cheaper than Hvar Town**, and many visitors prefer to stay there. What to see: **Tvrdalj Castle**, the sixteenth-century house of the poet Petar Hektorović, containing a **saltwater fish pool inside the building**, a walled garden, and inscriptions carved into the walls — a strange building with no real parallel. Then the stone old town and its lanes, St Stephen''s church, and remains of the Greek wall. ⚠ **The car-ferry port is here**, not in Hvar Town — a point many people get wrong when booking.
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