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 The oldest island settlements were in the interior beside the poljes and the many caves, Zrnovo, Pupnat, Cara, Smokvica and Blato, later developed on the sites of Greek and Roman settlements, and near them: only the city of Korcula grew on the sea shore. Lumbarda developed rather late, because a provision from the 14th century Korcula Statute explicitly prohibited the settlement of that area. Nevertheless, from the end of the 15th century people of Korcula built their summer houses and worked the land there, and a village gradually formed around them. Raciste dates from the 17th century, founded by refugees from the Turks on the mainland, mostly from Herzegovina, while Vela Luka developed at the beginning of the 19th century.
The island population often changed considerably in number because of political and economic conditions, and frequent epidemics of contagious diseases. The present inhabitants are Slavs, and the original Roman population that the Croats found when they came here in the 7th century was completely assimilated by the beginning of the 14th century. A mid -14th century census shows that about 5,000 people lived on the island and about half of them in the city of Korcula. At the end of that century, however, after several epidemics of the plague and the Turkish siege of 15 7 1, the number of islanders fell to only 2,500, and of that number 1,000 lived in the city. Since then the number of islanders has slowly increased, but the population of the city of Korcula remained almost the same until the beginning of the 1 9 h century when it, too, began to increase. Economic hardship made many craftsmen, especially shipbuilders and stone-masons disperse throughout the Mediterranean. In the first decades of the 20th century many people left the island for South and North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Most people left the island in 1925, when 3,500 people left Blato and Vela Luka.
In the second half of the 20th century, especially after the Second World War, the number of islanders has constantly been growing, and has today reached about 20,000.
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