Sveta Nedjelja Wine VillageHvar Island

Sveta Nedjelja is a village of a few hundred people on the south coast of Hvar, about 7 nautical miles east of Hvar Town by boat, and it grows some of the best red wine in Croatia. The reason is above it. The village sits directly under Sveti Nikola, at 628 metres the highest peak on the island, and the slopes between the summit and the sea face due south, catching sun from morning to evening and shedding heat into the water at night. The vine that thrives here is Plavac Mali, the Dalmatian red, and on these terraces it makes a wine that is dense, dark and full of the sun that made it.

The name most people come for is Zlatan Otok, the winery built here by the late Zlatan Plenković, whose reds put Sveta Nedjelja on the map in the 1990s. The family still runs it. Their restaurant in the small marina has a cellar dug below sea level, where bottles age with the water on the other side of the wall, and a tasting there is the reason to make the stop. Smaller family cellars in the village pour their own Plavac and rosé if you ask.

Sveta Nedjelja is not a beach destination, and that is its charm from the water. The coast here is steep and rocky, so your skipper moors in the little harbour or anchors below the cliffs, and you walk up through the stone lanes to the tastings. Above the village a cave in the mountainside once held a hermitage of Augustinian monks, reached by a short, steep path with a view over the whole south coast, and the cliffs around the village are a well-known climbing area. For most of its history the only way in was by sea or over the ridge on foot, and the place still feels like that. The road has finally caught up: in 2026 the coastal road from Dubovica to Sveta Nedjelja opened, cutting the drive from Hvar Town to a fraction of the old detour through the mountain tunnel. By boat it was always the direct way, and it still is.

On a south-coast day from Hvar, Sveta Nedjelja is the natural lunch and wine stop after the swim stops: the Red Rocks lie just to the west, Dubovica and the Zaraće bays a few miles back towards town. Give it two hours, taste the wine, and let the skipper drive home.