A village of three hundred, facing Korčula across the channel.

Where you are

Viganj lies on the southern coast of the Pelješac peninsula, in a wide cove west of Cape Saint Liberan, about 7 km from Orebić. Roughly 330 people live here. Across the channel is the island of Korčula; the ferry from Orebić reaches Korčula town in about fifteen minutes, which makes a walled medieval town a plausible afternoon rather than an expedition.

The beach

The shoreline here is pebble and gravel, clear and shelving gently. Our own stretch has free loungers, umbrellas and showers. The water in the channel stays clean and cool because it moves — the same funnel that produces the wind.

What there is to do when it is not blowing

• Korčula town — fifteen minutes by ferry from Orebić
• Pelješac wine — the Dingac and Postup vineyards are among the best known in Croatia, and they are on this peninsula
• Walking and cycling — trails run up behind the village into the hills
• Ston — the salt pans and the long defensive walls, at the neck of the peninsula
• Orebić — the maritime museum, shops, and the ferry terminal

Getting to Viganj

By car, Viganj is reached along the peninsula road from the Pelješac bridge, which since opening removed the border crossing that used to sit on the coastal drive from Split and Zagreb. Dubrovnik is roughly two hours away, Split around three.

The nearest airports are Dubrovnik and Split. There is a ferry connection to Korčula from Orebić and catamaran services along the coast in season.

The Pelješac peninsula

Viganj sits near the western tip of Pelješac, the second largest peninsula in Croatia — roughly seventy kilometres of limestone ridge running north-west from the mainland at Ston. It is thinly populated and mostly vineyard, pine and bare rock. The ridge directly behind the village climbs to Sveti Ilija at 961 m, and it is part of why the channel below behaves the way it does: the mountain shelters the coast and steers the afternoon wind along it.

The peninsula is worth a day out of the water. Divna, Prapratno, Žuljana and Trstenik are the beaches people drive to, and the road between them is slow, narrow and almost always empty.

Wine

Plavac Mali grows on the steep south-facing slopes above Dingač and Postup, half an hour east of Viganj, and the wine made there is what the peninsula is best known for outside Croatia. Dingač was the first Croatian wine to be given a protected designation, in 1961. Most of the cellars are around Potomje and Trstenik, and many of them take visitors through the season.

Ston and the oysters

At the neck of the peninsula, about seventy kilometres from Viganj, Ston has salt pans worked since antiquity and roughly five kilometres of fourteenth-century walls built to defend them — among the longest surviving fortifications in Europe. The bay below it, Mali Ston, is where the oysters and mussels on the local menus come from.