Best hotels in Hvar Island | Visually Compare Top Stays Side-by-Side

An Overview of the Boutique & Luxury Hotel Landscape in Hvar Island

Hvar Island divides itself, quietly but firmly, between two kinds of attention. The town of Hvar, clustered around its Venetian-era piazza and the 16th-century Benedictine convent, draws the crowds — the yachts, the aperitivo hour, the predictable summer theater. Stari Grad, seventeen kilometers to the east along the island's spine, is older and considerably less interested in performing itself. Founded by the Greeks in 385 BC, it sits around a long tidal inlet, its stone lanes still following a pre-Roman agricultural grid that UNESCO has recognized as one of the best-preserved ancient land divisions in the world. These two poles offer genuinely different experiences of the same island, and the two hotels on this list reflect that split almost exactly. Maslina Resort occupies a hillside above Stari Grad Bay, and it earns its position among the more considered addresses on the Dalmatian coast. The property was developed with serious attention to the local vernacular: dry-stone walls, indigenous plantings of lavender and rosemary, and a farm-to-table commitment that sources from the estate's own olive groves and kitchen garden. The architecture keeps its scale low and horizontal, reading less as a resort dropped onto a landscape than as something that grew out of it incrementally. For a traveler who finds meaning in where food comes from, or who simply wants to spend a week largely undistracted, Stari Grad's quieter end of the island makes that possible in a way that Hvar town, at the height of summer, does not. Palace Elisabeth, in Hvar town itself, occupies a 19th-century Austro-Hungarian building on the harborfront promenade, and operates at a different register entirely. The renovation preserved the period shell while updating interiors with a restrained contemporary hand, and the location places guests directly in the middle of the town's social energy, for better or worse depending on one's tolerance for that particular kind of midsummer spectacle. The hotel carries a medium quality tier at a splurge price point, which reflects the premium of its address more than a consistent experiential edge. It suits the visitor whose interest is in the piazza and the harbor, in proximity to the Old Town's fortress and the rhythms of the port. The two properties are not competing for the same person, and that distinction is worth taking seriously before booking.