St Mark's Cathedral bell tower

The town’s anchor, and the climb that pays off

St Mark’s Cathedral is the building Korcula’s old town is built around — a pale-stone Gothic-Renaissance pile on the main square, with a carved doorway and a cool, plain interior you can usually step into for free. Pleasant enough, but it is not the reason to come. The reason is the bell tower.

For a small fee — expect from around €4 — you can climb it, and this is the best view in town. A tight, twisting stone staircase corkscrews up through the tower and gets genuinely cramped near the top, so it is not one for anyone uneasy in confined spaces. Emerge at the top and the whole herringbone old town lays itself out below you in terracotta, with the channel and the dark hills of the Pelješac peninsula across the water. Allow twenty minutes to half an hour for the cathedral and the climb together.

Pick a clear day and a quiet hour

This is the part of a Korcula visit worth treating as weather-dependent. On a bright day the panorama justifies the ticket several times over; on a hazy or overcast one the view flattens and the squeeze up the stair feels less worth it. If the sky is clear, do it.

Opening is broadly daytime through the warmer months, with shorter and patchier access out of season and closures during services — hours shift year to year, so confirm current hours and prices on the official site before you bank on it. Time the climb for earlier or later in the day if you can, both to dodge the cruise-tender crowds funnelling through the old town and for kinder light on the rooftops. It is cheap, quick and high — a tidy add-on to a slow wander of the streets below rather than a sight in its own right.