Epic Croatia Road Trip - Day 9 – Pag Island

 

Looking at the nautical charts, I’ve always thought Pag island looked like a lobster; this photo, taken by a pilot friend, proves it! It also shows that Pag, like the rest of Croatia is not that easy to explore in a logical way. You have to go up and down the “spine” to get to various places.

Day 8 of our trip saw us arrive on Pag and we spent the night at one of Croatia’s biggest campsites - Camp Straško, near Novalja. For more information on that see Croatia Camping Guide - Camp Straško.

Pag is one of the few Croatian islands of any size I’ve never been to so I decided to spend three of my precious trip days exploring it to the full. Novalja, the “capital”, was the first stop of our first day on the island and I was pleased to be there off season as it is PACKED in the summer and has the reputation of being one of Croatia’s most vibrant party towns.

You can tell just how busy Novalja gets by the size of its hypermarkets – the largest I’ve seen and seeming to have the contents of an entire high street inside. One of the shop assistants told me the island has 100,000 visitors in August which is just as well as there were only about 10 of us on this rainy day in May!

However there’s much more to Pag than Novalja, it was raining and wasn’t much fun exploring on foot, so we decided to head to Lun which is about as far west as you can get on Pag. We’ll be reporting on Lun in our next posting but here’s a little more on Pag in general.

As most Croatiaphiles will know, Pag is reknowned for its salt cheese, lamb and lace. The cheese and lamb are special because of the salt and the aromatic herbs that the sheep feed on. Climate (particularly the dominant Bora [north-east] wind), soil and geology also play their part.

Find out more on the following links:

Pag Cheese

Boskinac Blog - Pag

Pag’s lacemaking is inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and you can read more about that here:

UNESCO - Lacemaking in Croatia

Many may not know that Pag has also achieved fame for an alleged UFO mystery – the mysterious PAG triangle. There’s a complex set of theories, best explained by the experts, and the following links, particularly the first, will enlighten you further:

You Tube - Mysterious Triangle On The Island Of Pag

Pag Triangle - Alien Visitors Again?

That’s it for now – there’ll be more on Novalja later, including Stara Novalja, the old town. Next is Lun, with its olive groves and olive museum.