The Island They Prescribed: An honest week on Lošinj, Croatia’s island of vitality
Lošinj has been doctor’s orders since 1892. I spent a week finding out whether the prescription still holds, and it turns out the Habsburgs were onto something.
In the autumn of 1895, the man who would become heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne came to Lošinj simply to breathe. Archduke Franz Ferdinand had a weak chest, and his physicians packed him off to this pine-clad island in the northern Adriatic for six weeks of sea air.
He was in good company and rather late to it. Sixteen years earlier, the local botanist Ambroz Haračić had founded a meteorological station in Mali Lošinj. His measurements helped persuade Vienna to recognise Mali and Veli Lošinj as climatic health resorts in 1892.
Word of the island’s air travelled, and the grand villas built in that era still stand among the pines today. I came to test that old prescription with newer instruments. I travel as a designer and researcher who measures what a place actually allows your body to do, and Lošinj gave me a great deal to measure.
The island itself
The first answer arrives before you have even unpacked. Haračić did not only study the forest, he planted it, seeding the island with pines that still tumble down to the waterline and still scent everything above them.
Among them grow something like 1,200 plant species, close to 230 of them considered medicinal, and on a warm afternoon the air is unmistakably different, resinous and faintly salted, threaded with wild sage, immortelle and myrtle, the kind of air you catch yourself breathing more slowly on purpose.
Behind the town Mount Osoršćica climbs to nearly six hundred metres, the island banks more than 260 days of sun a year, and you understand quickly why the Austrians reached for their prescription pads.
The swimming is where the island does its plainest, best work. There is almost no sand. You pick your way down warm stone steps into water so clear you can count the pebbles two metres down, and that first cold shock resets something before your head has caught up with your body.
My son found a channel between two rocks and stayed in it for an hour while the swell breathed in and out around him. Those were the calmest hours of my week, and they asked nothing of me and cost precisely nothing.
The reset I did not book
The best reset of the week was not on any treatment menu. Providenca is a viewpoint restaurant reached by a climb above Mali Lošinj, and you sit on terraced stone with the whole archipelago poured out below and the light going molten gold over it.
Elevation and a long horizon are the oldest calming trick there is, older than any spa, and something in the shoulders simply gives way. I stayed until the sea turned the colour of the wine, and left lighter than I arrived.
Nor does the island only ever perform contentment, and I trusted it the more for that. On a path one evening I came upon a small locked wayside shrine set into a wall, flowers left behind the grille.
An island that has sold recovery for well over a century could easily keep only its bright face turned out. Lošinj does not, and it is the more human for it.
The famous seafront
You feel the island’s old genius most on foot. Lošinj threads its bays together with a lungomare, a seaside promenade shaded the whole way by Haračić’s pines, and walking it is the closest thing the island has to a headline attraction.
It runs past the grand old villas and the bathing coves of Čikat and Sunčana uvala, the water sliding from bottle green to ink a few steps to your right, and it is where the resinous air the doctors prized goes quietly to work on you without your noticing.
Do it slowly, ideally twice, once with a morning coffee and once into the sunset. It is free, and it is arguably the most effective thing on the island.
The modern cure
Modern Lošinj has not let the tradition gather dust. In Veli Lošinj, wrapped in its own century-old pinewood and set barely fifty metres from the sea, Vitality Hotel Punta carries the island’s health story into the present, and it has the silverware to prove it, named Croatia’s best wellness retreat at the World Spa Awards every year from 2021 to 2025.
Its Vitality Centre runs to more than 5,400 square metres: indoor and outdoor seawater pools, including a large outdoor infinity pool looking down the Adriatic, a long run of saunas and steam rooms, and nine treatment rooms that work with local olive oil, aloe and aromatic island oils.
A sea-view gym, thirteen tennis courts and an open-air climbing wall stand ready for anyone who likes their recovery active.
What lifts it above the usual four-star wellness box is how directly it nods to Haračić. The hotel is a certified allergy-friendly resort and runs its own pulmonary rehabilitation programme. It is worth being precise about what that means.
The 1892 status was a climatic designation, and these are the hotel’s present-day wellness services, not a clinical promise to treat anyone’s condition. What the island itself indisputably does is make the healthy behaviours easy: walking, sea-swimming, sleep and time outdoors.
When the destination does the heavy lifting
And yet the most interesting thing about Punta, for me, was not inside the spa at all. It was outside.
Pine, sea, daylight, long horizons, the mixed scent of the vegetation and the repetitive, hypnotic sound of the water. Lošinj makes the behaviours we associate with recovery unusually easy. Walk. Swim. Go outside. Look at the trees. Look at the horizon. Eat slowly. Sleep. Do less.
I assessed the room the way I assess any stay in my own restorative-design research, through light, sound, privacy, sleep conditions, nature connection and sensory load rather than thread count or a conventional star rating.
On those terms it did quietly well, but the assessment only underlined the obvious: most of what settled me was arriving through the window, not from the spa.
A hotel can build an excellent spa. It cannot manufacture Lošinj.
Here, the island was already doing much of the work, and Punta is at its considerable best when it simply opens the doors and lets it.
In the end
So, did Lošinj reset me?
Emphatically, and the Habsburg instinct was a sound one.
The island does its work through the plainest channels imaginable, cold water, warm stone, resinous air and a long view down from a height, and it has been quietly handing that cure out, free of charge, for a hundred and thirty years. Bring an appetite for slowness and very little else.
Come for the prescription the island has been writing since 1892. Everything else is a very pleasant bonus.
Bex traveled to Croatia as a guest of the Croatian National Tourist Board.
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Bex Hamilton is a biophilic design expert and wellness travel writer specialising in spaces that calm the nervous system. As founder of Branded Biophilia (previously Eco Foundry/Concept Foundry), she has delivered high-profile living installations for clients including Amazon, Google, Instagram, Facebook, Netflix and London Fashion Week. Notable projects include a 400-plant wall at Waterloo Station, collaboration with de la Cuona for Wow House Chelsea, and Sustainable Discovery where Anna Wintour (Vogue’s sustainability editor) was a guest. Featured in The Telegraph, The Sun and Metro, with published work in CENTRED Magazine, ArchiExpo e-Magazine, Elite Business Magazine and Prestige Events Magazine. Environment 100 Winner (2025) and Theo Paphitis #SBS Winner (Dragons’Den, January 2025). Brings a ‘sustainability without the sermon’ approach to design and travel writing.
