Rab: what to see, from the four bell towers to Lopar's sandy beaches

The island of Rab lies in the Kvarner bay between Krk and Pag, under the Velebit, and its town of the same name is one of the best-preserved small medieval towns of the Adriatic. The car ferry from Stinica on the mainland to Mišnjak takes a quarter of an hour and runs all year; in summer a second ferry links Valbiska on Krk with Lopar, and Jadrolinija's catamaran comes from Rijeka. From Mišnjak the town is 15 minutes by road. Everything below is within a day, but Rab rewards two: one for the town, one for the beaches.

The town: three streets and four towers

Start on the main square by the harbour, Municipium Arba, which keeps the town's Roman name. The Prince's Palace on its edge, Gothic and Renaissance with battlements and the rectors' coats of arms cut into the stone, was the seat of Venetian government and still houses the town's offices; read the facade from a café table. From the square three streets run the length of the peninsula: the Lower by the sea, the Middle with the portals, biforas and shops, and the Upper by the churches. Walk out along the Middle Street, where the town lives from morning coffee to midnight stroll, and come back along the Upper, where the towers stand.

On the Upper Street the towers come one after another. The ruins of St John the Evangelist are the oldest and most moving: an early Christian basilica taken apart in the 19th century, of which the perimeter walls, the arches of the apse and a bell tower remain; the tower can be climbed for a view with a smaller crowd than its famous neighbour. St Justine, a small Renaissance church with an onion-domed tower, holds the Museum of Sacred Art and the town's greatest treasure, the reliquary with the head of St Christopher, Rab's protector; half an hour is enough. Then the Church of St Mary the Great, the former cathedral, with a facade of pink and white stone bands, and beside it the Great Bell Tower: 26 metres of 12th-century Romanesque, four storeys of biforas and triforas growing lighter towards the top. The climb up wooden stairs is the crown of the walk, and the view shows all four towers in a row, Kalifront on one side and the Velebit on the other. The ticket is symbolic and the hours follow the season.

Above the walls, on the land side, lies Komrčar, a park planted at the end of the 19th century by the forester Pravdoje Belia and now a forest of Aleppo pines, cypresses and holm oaks as tall as the towers. Its paths lead through shade to the bathing spots below the park, which makes it the loveliest way to the sea the town has, and its benches are where the locals take their evening walk with a view of the towers through the crowns.

Beaches: sand at Lopar, coves on Kalifront

The Lopar peninsula in the north of the island is built of sandstone, so its twenty or so bays are dusted with sand, a geological gift on a coast of shingle. Paradise Beach (Rajska plaža) is the largest and best equipped: a mile of sand in a shallow bay where the sea stays knee-deep for hundreds of metres, with loungers, showers, cafés, slides and lifeguards, a machine for family days and, in July and August, thousands of people. Sahara, on the north of the same peninsula, is the opposite: a sandy cove reached only by a twenty-minute path through the maquis, naturist by tradition, without loungers or music, with an improvised bar in summer; bring water and a parasol. Lopar is twenty minutes' drive from the Mišnjak ferry and fifteen from Rab town.

West of the town, Kalifront is the island's green half: a peninsula under the densest holm-oak forest on the Adriatic, protected as the Dundo forest park, with shingle coves at the end of every path, Kandarola, Gozinka, Jelenovica and dozens more, many reachable only on foot, by bicycle or by boat. The way to do it is a bicycle from Rab town or Kampor, a swimsuit in the rucksack and a day of composing your own map of coves. The tracks are gravel and the marking scant, so keep a map on the phone, and bring water, there are no springs.

Goli otok: the excursion that explains a century

Across the Barbat channel lies Goli otok, a stone desert on which from 1949 a political prison camp held those condemned in Yugoslavia's break with Stalin; it stayed a prison until 1988. What the prisoners built is still there, workshops, dormitories, a power plant and a cinema, empty shells with the bora blowing through. Excursion boats run from Rab town and Lopar in summer, smaller boats cross from Barbat in a quarter of an hour, and on the island a tourist train rounds the main points. Bring water, a hat and firm shoes, shade is almost none, and read the boards: this is a memorial, not a set.