The island of Košljun is a real gem situated in the bay in front of Punat. It was picturesquely described by the friar Mavro Velnić: “Being on Krk without seeing Košljun is like being in Rome without seeing the Pope.”
In the central part of the island, with a circumference of merely 1075 meters, elevated only six meters above the sea, there is the Franciscan monastery with a representative Renaissance church and a cloister. The church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary was completed in 1523 at the site of an older Romanesque church. It is richly adorned with two artistic breath-taking works of art. The triumphal arch of the church is decorated by 9.7-meter artistic composition by the Venetian master Francesco Ughetto showing the Last Judgement (Heaven, Purgatory and Hell) with a total of 123 figures. The other work that should be mentioned is the altar polyptych from 1535 by Girolamo da Santacroce, a Venetian master who left a large part of his artistic opus on the eastern Adriatic coast. Within the complex there is the museum display, a rich ethnographic, archaeological and sacral collection, as well as a library. The museum contains the famous geographical map by Claudius Ptolemy, a Greek astronomer and geographer from the 2nd century, printed in Venice in 1511.