Hvar does not have sand. A few coves hold coarse grit that photographs like sand from a distance and disappoints on arrival, and that is the extent of it. Everything else is pebble, shingle, and flat rock going straight into water clear enough that you can count sea urchins from a standing position. This is the good version. It just takes some visitors a day to work that out.

The complaint in the reviews, and why it is aimed at the wrong thing

Read enough one-star reviews of Dalmatian beaches and the same sentence keeps turning up, written by somebody who booked a Mediterranean island and expected the Caribbean. No sand. Uncomfortable. The trouble is that sand is exactly what makes water cloudy. Pebble and limestone give you visibility straight to the bottom, no grit in the bag, none in the bed, nothing tracked back to the apartment. Change the expectation and the complaint dissolves.

Dubovica pays the price of being famous

Dubovica is the cove everyone has already seen: a curve of pebble below the old road east of Hvar Town, a stone house at one end, water going an implausible green over the shallows. The walk down is steep and stony, which used to keep the numbers honest and no longer does. Go in the morning or go in June. By the middle of an August day the bay holds a car park’s worth of people and a line of boats moored across its mouth.

Zaraće and Mekićevica ask for a little effort first

Zaraće is a pair of coves below the village of the same name, down a path steep enough to count as a decision. Fewer people make it, which is the entire recommendation. Mekićevica lies east of Hvar Town and most people arrive by taxi boat, because the track in is unkind to ordinary cars. There is somewhere to eat there, which changes the character of the day: you can stay from morning until the light goes without having to think about lunch.

Working out which coves you can reach on foot and which genuinely need a boat will save you a wasted afternoon, and the guides on Hvar.com are more use for that than a map application that thinks every white line is a road.

Pokonji Dol is worth the boat; the town beaches are not worth the walk

Pokonji Dol is the islet with the lighthouse off the front of Hvar Town, a short taxi boat ride and a properly good swim once you are on it. The town beaches are what you settle for when you have decided not to travel. Concrete platforms and thin strips of pebble west of the centre, full from mid morning, swimming in the harbour’s water rather than the open sea’s. They are fine. They are also why some people go home from Hvar convinced the swimming was mediocre.

Buy the water shoes and stop arguing about it

Rubber-soled water shoes cost very little and solve most of what people dislike about a rock coast. They carry you over hot pebble without hopping, off a slab into deep water without the slip, and past the sea urchins, which are common and black and entirely avoidable if you are not putting a bare foot down blind. Nobody looks good in them. Everybody wearing them is having a better day than the person picking down the shingle on tiptoe with a towel held over their head.

The best swimming on the island is not on any list

Once the named coves are out of the way you start to see the actual system. The coast between Hvar Town and Milna, the whole southern shore under Sveta Nedjelja and Ivan Dolac, the small bays of Šćedro: all of it is broken limestone with slabs at the water’s edge, and any one of those slabs is a beach. No name, no bar, no sign, occasionally a rope somebody has bolted in to help you climb out. You reach them on the coast paths or by hiring a small boat for a day. Take a hat, take more water than you think you need, and pick a slab facing away from the afternoon wind.