‘Time slows down in Lastovo’: I may just have found Croatia’s most unspoilt archipelago

Five hours by ferry from Split – and a world away from the clubs of Hvar – the islands’ wooded hills, pine-shaded beaches and transparent waters are buzzing with nature

The sound of a baby crying echoes eerily in the night sky, seemingly coming from the uninhabited Zaklopatica islet that faces the terrace of our holiday rental in Lastovo. “Do you think that’s a bird?” I ask my husband. “At this time of night? Doubt it,” he says.

Fast forward a couple of days and we’re in a park ranger’s motorboat bumping around the far-flung Lastovo archipelago in the Adriatic. All its 46 islands (including the main Lastovo island), islets and reefs were declared a nature park in 2006. By luck, I’m with the ornithologist whose discovery of the nesting sites of some of the Mediterranean’s most endangered birds – yelkouan and Scopoli’s shearwaters – was instrumental in Lastovo getting the official protection it deserves.