Zastrog
Zaostrog is a town and seaport in the southern part of Makarska Riviera. It belongs to the municipality of Gradac. Town Zaostrog is stretched in a natural and spacious basin, surrounded by high and steep mountain slopes of the mountain Biokovo-Rilc. The southern slopes of Rilic with peak Šapašnik, 920 m, surround Zaostrog and protect it from the north, Viter 770 m, from the east, a mild green Plana 260 m from the west. White pebbles and the broad green Zaostrogs bays mourn the Adriatic Sea, which was spilled through the Big gates deep in the Neretva channel all the way to Stons clarity.
Sights
Town with 450 residents it is still dominated with more than half a millennium old Franciscan monastery with a high tower. Visitors of the monastery have open museum, ethnological collection, gallery and a large library with over 30,000 titles, a substantial part of the older Croatian literature.
Great part of his creative life he spent, perhaps the most prominent Croatian folk poet, Fr Andrew Kacic Miosic, known and loved by the common people as "old man Milovan", as well as his greatest work, "Pleasant conversation of Slavic people". In the monastery, after the very threshold of the main entrance to the parish church "Assumption of Mary", above which stands a stone tablet engraved in historical writing, "bosancica", there is also brother Andrew tomb with the inscription.
History
By the records of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine, the fort Ostrog under Viter by which Zaostrog was later named (for-Ostrog), was the capital of the former stronghold of the Croatian state Pagania, founded by Neretvans.
t the peak of its powers(IX and X century), Pagania was stretching from the west of the river Cetina,from Neretva River to the east. Northern boundary was stretching from peaks Ljubuša, Vrana and Cvrsnica, Peljesac peninsula and the islands of Brac, Hvar, Korcula and Mljet in the south belonged to Pagania also. There is a curiosity that is transmitted for generations, that one nice day the head of Pagania from Viter above Ostrog, saw almost all of his state borders, which is also now a challenge to mountaineers and free climbers.
In the early years of the last century, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which integral part of that time was Dalmatia, built a pier (dock) and regulate the villages flood. Both buildings have historical and heritage value.
Economy
Residents of Zaostrog now mostly live from renting rooms and apartments, for the short tourist seasons, as well as from small farming and fishing. Zaostrog would, given the almost ideal geographical location and rich historical heritage, with well designed and landscaped public areas should become one of the leading tourist destinations on the Makarska Riviera. Even more so, because unlike some other coastal towns, Zaostrog is well preserved from ugly concrete structures and apartment buildings.