The Stone Terraces of Vis – A Landscape Built by Hand

Stone by Stone: How Vis Shaped Its Landscape

Across the hillsides of Vis, generations of islanders transformed rocky slopes into farmland. Their dry-stone walls remain one of the clearest traces of the island’s agricultural past.

If you approach Vis from the sea, look beyond the towns and beaches towards the hillsides. Across the landscape, long lines of stone divide the slopes into terraces, sometimes climbing high above the coast.

These walls were not built as monuments.

They were built because people needed land to cultivate.

Stone by stone, generations of islanders cleared rocky ground and used the material around them to create walls, boundaries and terraces. The result is a landscape shaped jointly by geology and centuries of human labour.

Making Farmland from Stone

Vis is a limestone island with areas of thin soil, steep slopes and long, dry Mediterranean summers. Cultivating such terrain required ingenuity and enormous physical effort.

Stones removed from the ground could be stacked without mortar to form dry-stone walls. On sloping terrain, retaining walls helped hold soil in place and created flatter areas that could be cultivated.

The technique allowed farmers to make productive use of land that would otherwise have been difficult to work.

These walls also performed several practical functions. They helped limit soil erosion, divided plots and provided protection from wind, while the terraces helped retain the precious soil needed for agriculture.

What appears today as a beautiful feature of the landscape was originally working infrastructure.

A Landscape of Vineyards

Wine has been part of the history of Vis since antiquity.

The Greek settlement of Issa was established on the island in the 4th century BC, and wine production became an important part of the island’s economy over the centuries that followed.

As viticulture developed, generations of farmers cultivated vineyards across suitable valleys and hillsides. Terracing made it possible to grow vines even where the natural slope made agriculture difficult.

Some plots were small and narrow, with only limited space for vines. But on an island where cultivable soil was valuable, even modest pieces of land mattered.

The terraces therefore tell a story not only about wine, but about the extraordinary amount of work required to create an agricultural landscape from Mediterranean karst.

The Art of Dry-Stone Walling

The walls were traditionally constructed without mortar or cement. Their stability came from selecting and positioning stones carefully so that the structure supported itself.

In Croatia this technique is known as suhozid.

Dry-stone construction has been used throughout the Adriatic and Dinaric regions for centuries for terraces, field boundaries, paths, shelters and other agricultural structures.

Its importance extends far beyond Vis.

In 2018, the Art of Dry Stone Walling, Knowledge and Techniques was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, with Croatia among the countries included in the multinational nomination.

The UNESCO recognition concerns the traditional knowledge and skills of dry-stone construction rather than the individual terraces of Vis. But the landscape of Vis is a striking example of the wider Mediterranean tradition to which that knowledge belongs.

Stone by Stone Through the Centuries

The terraces were not created in a single period.

They accumulated gradually as generations cleared, cultivated, divided and maintained the land. Walls were repaired when they collapsed, new plots were opened and existing agricultural areas were adapted to changing needs.

This is one reason the landscape is so difficult to date precisely. What we see today is the result of many different periods of use rather than one vast construction project.

For centuries, the walls formed part of everyday working life.

Farmers did not set out to create a beautiful landscape. They created one because they needed to make the land productive.

Abandonment and Survival

During the late 19th and 20th centuries, agriculture on Vis changed dramatically.

Emigration, economic change and the decline of labour-intensive traditional farming left many plots without the people required to maintain them. During the Yugoslav period, Vis also became a strategically important military island and remained largely closed to foreign visitors until 1989.

Many vineyards and agricultural terraces were gradually abandoned.

Without regular maintenance, vegetation began reclaiming some of the old fields and sections of dry-stone wall collapsed. Elsewhere, the structures survived remarkably well.

Today it is possible to see both processes across the island: restored vineyards and working agricultural land alongside terraces slowly disappearing beneath Mediterranean vegetation.

A Living Agricultural Heritage

Wine production remains an important part of Vis, and several island producers continue to cultivate traditional grape varieties including Vugava and Plavac Mali.

Some old agricultural land has been returned to cultivation, while elsewhere the walls survive mainly as traces of an earlier way of life.

For visitors, this makes the landscape worth looking at more carefully.

The stone walls beside a road, the terraces above a secluded bay or the seemingly abandoned lines crossing a hillside are not random features. They record where generations of people cleared land, protected soil, planted crops and worked to make life possible on a rocky island.

More Than a Landscape

The stone terraces of Vis were never created for visitors to admire.

That is precisely what makes them important.

They are the physical remains of ordinary work carried out over generations: clearing stone, building walls, tending vines, repairing terraces and protecting scarce agricultural soil.

Together, they transformed parts of Vis from rocky slopes into a cultivated landscape.

Today, some terraces remain in use, others are being restored and many are slowly returning to nature. Yet the pattern they created is still visible across the island.

Look closely when travelling through Vis, particularly across the old agricultural areas and hillsides.

The landscape itself tells the story.

It was shaped stone by stone, generation after generation.

Sources & further reading

UNESCO – Art of Dry Stone Walling, Knowledge and Techniques
Official UNESCO information on the traditional knowledge and techniques of dry-stone construction, inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia – The Art of Dry-Stone Walling
Official Croatian information on the dry-stone tradition, including its use in shaping agricultural landscapes, creating terraces and making rocky karst terrain suitable for cultivation.

Geomorphological Features of Vis Island – Naše more
Academic research on the landscape and geomorphology of Vis, including the extensive transformation of slopes through agricultural terracing and the use of dry-stone retaining walls.