Mamma Mia! They found out about Vis!

If you check out our destination guides and itineraries for sailing from Split, Trogir or Kastela, you’ll find that one of the recommended places to stop is Vis island. In fact, we’ve been recommending it as a place to visit for years!

Because of its strategic position in the Med, the island has a long and bloody history, and has been owned by everyone from the Romans, the Russians, and even the British (there’s an old British fort on the island!).

Most notably, the island was a Yugoslav military base from the 1950’s to 1989, when it was out of bounds for most people – which checked its development and means that the island is still largely uninhabited (population in 2011 was just over three thousand) and, crucially, the beaches and cliffs are unspoilt. In fact, there’s still large parts of the island that you can’t even get to on foot!

The main reasons to visit Vis were the old town (which is choc-full of old buildings and is a great place to stroll around with an ice-cream and to wonder at the buildings), Stiniva beach (one of the best beaches in the Med?) and the nearby blue cave of Bisevo (a crazy cave filled with neon blue water, which you can only view by boat) – they did lots of filming in the old town and on Stiniva beach, so you can expect those places to be rammed with fans of Colin Firth, Piers Brosnan and Meryl Streep from now on!

And whilst they didn’t film in the blue cave, they did loads of filming (including the Greek tavern scene, where the guy falls into the sea from a restaurant) in Komiza, which is the main start-point for land-lubbing tourist boat trips to the cave, so you’ll almost certainly be queuing longer to get into the cave.

There’ll also be more ferries making the 2-hour voyage from Split town that us sailors will have to watch out for!

All that is well and good, and the locals will welcome the tourists with open arms in the short term, but the more troubling news is that there’s plans for serious developments of the island on the back of the film (no doubt predominantly massive hotels who also buy up their own private beaches).

Properties prices are also expected to take a hike – the Greek island of Skopelos (where the first movie was filmed) has seen property prices quadruple, which has led to most of the locals being priced out of the market.

So if you haven’t been to Vis yet, you might want to get out there before it transforms from small and cute to big, ugly and corporate. Or you might even be too late…