Fort George is the product of 200 years of naval squabbling in the Adriatic. After a long restoration, it is now a multifunctional venue and a burgeoning bastion of good music, art, celebration and cuisine, all of it on a headland above the sea.
After the Royal Navy’s victory at the Battle of Vis in 1811, the British built a series of fortifications across the island. The largest and most important was named after the reigning British king, George III. They garrisoned it with a genuinely international force: free Italians, sharp-shooting Corsicans, Swiss guards once loyal to the French king, and the red-coated 35th Regiment of Foot, who arrived worn out from a long and bitter campaign in North America.
British rule did not last. When the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815 the island passed to Austria, and over the following century the fort served as barracks, latterly for the Yugoslav army, before being left empty to the weather and the pines.
We first reached it in 2013, in the fire brigade’s 4×4, because there was no proper road. What we found was an empty shell of stone, with no floors, no electricity, no water and no sewage. Bringing it back has been slow, careful work, from cutting drainage into solid rock to setting the floors back in beam by beam. The ground kept handing us its past as we went, from Yugoslav Army cartridges to older fragments, and the aim throughout has been to preserve and show the fort’s many layers rather than erase them.
Two hundred years on, the old walls are busy again with music, art, weddings and long dinners over the Adriatic. The restoration continues, phase by phase, and we would love to show you how far it has come when you visit.