Baljenac - an amazing island shaped like a giant's fingerprint (7 photos + 1 video)

Imagine flying over the Adriatic, looking down, and seeing a giant fingerprint spread out in the turquoise water.





This isn't an alien artifact or the surrealism of a mad artist. This is the Croatian island of Baljenac. And it really does look as if someone sturdy and celestial has placed their index finger on the sea.



This tiny speck of land covers just 1.4 square kilometers. But the most incredible thing is hidden from view. The entire island is covered with a network of dry stone walls (without a single drop of mortar). From the air, these long parallel lines resemble the papillary patterns of skin, those very ridges and grooves by which the police identify us.





This isn't a geological miracle. It's a man-made tale of patience. Like in Ireland or Scotland, dry walls have been built in Croatia for centuries, but here the reason is unique. It's karst. The soil along the coast is rocky, almost unsuitable for farming. To grow anything, farmers did the impossible: they dug stones out of the ground by hand and then stacked those same stones into walls in even, geometric patterns.



As a result, on tiny Balnatsa (the island is only half a kilometer long), these walls stretch for 23 kilometers! Imagine walking along the shore, and before you is a labyrinth created for the sake of vegetable beds.



What was all this for, other than beauty? The walls weren't just used to mark the boundaries of plots (so the neighbor would know where his tomatoes were). They protected the harvest from the "bura"—a fierce northeasterly wind that blows everything living off the coastal cliffs. Without these stone patterns, nothing would grow.



On the neighboring island of Pag, the length of the dry walls exceeds 1,000 kilometers. That's longer than many European rivers.



The Croatian government is fighting to have Baljenac listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site by UNESCO. And that's fair. We're used to fingerprints being left on glass. But here, people have left their mark on an entire island. And the dry stone walling technique used to create this fingerprint has been a protected heritage site since 2018 and included in UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.