Caska Bay

Why it is worth your time

Caska is a bay in which a Roman town hides beneath the sea's surface: here stood ancient Cissa, the settlement after which the whole island of Pag carries its old name, with villas, a harbour and an aqueduct, until earthquakes and the sea swallowed it. Today Caska is a tiny place by a shallow sandy cove at the bottom of the Pag bay, and its greatest treasure is seen with mask and snorkel: in the shallows and at a few metres' depth walls, foundations and amphora fragments show themselves, over which archaeologists have been diving for decades. On land the story is completed by the remains of a Roman column and a late antique tower, and boards along the path explain what lay where.

The beach is sandy and warm, with knee-deep sea far from the shore, so the youngest bathers to whom archaeology is indifferent are happy here too. A tavern by the bay works in summer. Caska is five minutes' drive from Novalja, with parking by the road; it is loveliest joined with a swim at Zrce, which lies just behind the hill, for a day that couples empire and clubs, two thousand years in two coves.