Sveti Stefan: What You Can and Cannot Visit

The short version

• The island itself: closed to non-residents. There is a gate and a guard on the causeway.
• The beach on the causeway's north side: public and free.
• The beach on the south side: hotel-managed, paid, often closed entirely.
• Miločer park and beach, a short walk north: public, and the nicer walk.
• Queen's Beach, beyond Miločer: hotel, and priced accordingly.

What happened

The village was a fifteenth-century fishing settlement, fortified against the Ottomans. In the 1950s the state moved the residents out and turned the whole island into a single hotel, which through the sixties and seventies took Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren and Princess Margaret.

It was leased to an international hotel group in 2007, reopened as a very expensive resort, and has been shut through a long dispute between the operator and the state over beach access and the terms of the lease. Its status changes; the practical answer for a visitor planning a trip is that you should not count on getting on.

Where the photograph comes from

The famous shot — the island from above with the causeway curving into it — is taken from the Adriatic Highway on the hill behind, not from the beach. There is a well-worn pull-in on the coast road just north of the village with a low wall and a view straight down onto it.

It fills with cars in the evening. Late afternoon light is better than midday, and the parking is easier before six.

The walk that is actually worth doing

From the north beach, follow the shoreline path into Miločer park. It runs through mature pines and cypress planted for the old royal summer residence, with the sea on one side, and comes out at Miločer beach after about ten minutes. Continue another fifteen and you reach Queen's Beach.

The park is public. The beaches within it are a patchwork of public and hotel-managed, and the boundary is marked with rope rather than signage. Where there are no sunbeds, you may sit.

Practical