Hotel Bijela Kuća, Bol, Croatia

Hotel Bijela Kuća commands the best views in Bol.

It sits perched above a small pebbly beach on the eastern edge of town and enjoys uninterrupted vistas across across dazzling azure waters to the wooded hills of Hvar, just to the south.

You can’t stay there, sadly. It was abandoned when tourists stopped coming to the island of Brać during the Balkan Wars.

In the early nineties it was used to house refugees. But when the war ended and they moved on, it was stripped of anything valuable and left to fall into disrepair.

There’s always talk of it reopening, I was told. But a dispute with the Dominican Monks in the nearby monastery is complicating negotiations. The hotel had originally been a Dominican school, you see, and the monks were forced to sell it by greedy Communist officials keen to turn a quick profit.

Now the monks want it back.

In the meantime, the ruins provide an atmospheric canvas for street art.

The murals are painted by artists who gather here every July for Graffiti Na Gradele.

For five days each year the hotel becomes a hive of activity.

Streets artists come from all over the world to paint over last year’s efforts and create new masterpieces of their own. There are workshops for local kids, Hip-Hop concerts and even rap battles.

And then the hotel goes silent again, but for the sound of a breeze murmuring in the pine trees.

And the monks chanting in their 12th century chapel at the end of the beach.