Mljet

Mljet National Park was established in 1960 on the north-western third of the island of the same name, in southern Dalmatia, and protects some 54 km². It was the first protected marine area in the Adriatic.

Its defining features are the two salt lakes, Veliko jezero and Malo jezero, connected to each other and to the open sea by narrow channels, so that their waters are marine but their thermal regime and circulation are their own. That partial isolation has generated particular biological communities and has made them an object of oceanographic study for decades. In the middle of Veliko jezero rises the islet of St Mary with a twelfth-century Benedictine monastery, an uncommon case of an island within a lake within an island.

Mljet is one of the most wooded islands in the Adriatic: its cover of Aleppo pine and Mediterranean holm oak is dense and continuous, which contrasts with the aridity of much of the Dalmatian coast. Tradition places the island of Ogygia, where the nymph Calypso held Odysseus for seven years, here. A characteristic conservation problem is the small Indian mongoose, introduced in the early twentieth century to control snakes and today a predator that affects the native fauna.