🇭🇷 Croatia · Southern Dalmatia and the islands
Dubrovnik is one of the most spectacular cities in the Mediterranean: an entire old town of polished limestone, ringed by almost two kilometres of intact walls that drop sheer to the Adriatic. For more than four centuries it was the capital of an independent republic — the Republic of Ragusa — that survived by playing diplomacy between Venice, the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, and that came to rival Venice itself in trade and cunning. Today the whole ensemble, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is an open-air museum and one of the most sought-after destinations in Europe.
The star attraction is walking the walls: a circuit of about 2 km along the top of the fortifications, with dizzying views over the terracotta roofs, the gleaming Stradun and a sea of impossible blue. Below await the Stradun itself, the Rector's Palace, the cathedral, the Franciscan monastery (with one of the oldest pharmacies in Europe, from 1317) and the Dominican one, Onofrio's Fountain and a maze of lanes and stairways. Outside the walls, the cable car climbs Mount Srđ to see the city from the sky, and the sea takes you to the island of Lokrum, to the Elafiti and to the placid village of Cavtat.
This guide covers Dubrovnik with a practical, honest eye: how to get there (by air, by bus over the new Pelješac bridge that avoids Bosnia, or by ferry), what the walls and the other admissions really cost — they are expensive — how to dodge the crowds and the midday overtourism, and what to see beyond the postcard. We also mention its fame as a Game of Thrones location, without letting that overshadow the essential: a city with a fascinating real history, shelled in 1991 and reborn from the rubble.
Dubrovnik was born around the 7th century, when refugees from neighbouring Epidaurum (today's Cavtat), destroyed by Avars and Slavs, settled on a rocky islet called Lausa (Ragusa), which in time merged with the Slavic settlement of Dubrovnik on the mainland. After centuries under Byzantium and then Venice (1205-1358), the Treaty of Zadar of 1358 gave it an autonomy that the city would turn into an independent republic: the Republic of Ragusa, governed by a merchant aristocracy and by a Rector who changed every month. Ragusa prospered as a maritime power by playing diplomacy and paying tribute to the Ottomans (from 1458) while trading across the Mediterranean; it was among the first to organise a health quarantine (1377) and abolished the slave trade very early, in 1416. The devastating earthquake of 1667 killed thousands and flattened the city, which was rebuilt in restrained baroque. The independent republic ended in 1808, abolished by Napoleon, and then passed to Austria and to Yugoslavia. In 1991-1992, during the Croatian war of independence, Dubrovnik was besieged and shelled by the Yugoslav People's Army; today its newer, paler roofs still recall that damage. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Croatia's southernmost tip and its islands: the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and its diplomacy, the abolition of the slave trade in 1416, the earthquake of 1667, the islands of Hvar, Korčula and Mljet, island depopulation and the siege of Dubrovnik in 1991.
Read the history of Southern Dalmatia and the islands →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Dubrovnik was born of a catastrophe. Around the 7th century, the ancient Greco-Roman city of Epidaurum (today's Cavtat), a few kilometres to the south, was destroyed by Avar and Slav raids, around the year 615. Its inhabitants fled and took refuge on a small rocky islet nearby, hard to attack, which they called Lausa — from which 'Ragusa', the city's Latin and Italian name, would derive. In time, that settlement of Latin refugees merged with a Slavic community established on the mainland slope, among oak woods (dubrava in Croatian, from which 'Dubrovnik' is said to come). A marshy arm of sea separated the two cores; when it was filled in, around the 12th century, it became the main street we know today as the Stradun, and the two communities joined into a single city.
For centuries the new Ragusa lived under the nominal protection of the Byzantine Empire, always looking to the sea as its source of wealth. In 1050, by tradition, the Croatian king Stephen I granted it land to the north that secured fresh water and a harbour. Small, wedged between the sea and the mountains, with hardly any farmland, the city soon understood that its destiny lay in maritime trade and diplomatic skill, not in force. That lesson would make it, centuries later, one of the most original and longest-lived republics in Europe.
After a long period under Venetian sovereignty (1205-1358), Dubrovnik managed to break free. Under the Treaty of Zadar of 1358, which drove Venice out of much of the Dalmatian coast, the city came under the distant sovereignty of the king of Hungary-Croatia, who demanded tribute but hardly meddled in its affairs. Ragusa used that autonomy to become a republic independent in practice, governed by a closed merchant aristocracy through councils (the Great Council, the Senate) and by a Rector (Knez) who acted as ceremonial head of state for a single month, shut inside his palace so that no one could accumulate personal power. The city's motto, carved in stone, summed up its spirit: 'Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro' — 'liberty is not sold for all the gold in the world'.
The key to its survival was shrewd diplomacy without ideological scruple. Surrounded by far larger powers, Ragusa always played them off against each other: it recognised Hungarian sovereignty, but from 1458 it also came to terms with the Ottoman Empire, to which it paid an annual tribute (set at around 12,500 gold ducats by 1481) in exchange for trading freely across all the sultan's domains, including access to the Black Sea, closed to other Europeans. Later, after the Austro-Turkish wars, it also placed itself under Habsburg protection (1684). With that web of crossed loyalties, and with no army worth the name, the small republic survived four centuries and competed on equal terms with Venice. Its ships crossed the Mediterranean and the Atlantic; its trading colonies spread through the Balkans and the Levant; and in its golden age, around 1500, its territories held close to 90,000 inhabitants.
Ragusa was not only a mercantile power: in several respects it was also a community remarkably ahead of its time. In 1377, faced with the terror of the Black Death sweeping Europe, the city's Great Council instituted one of the first organised health quarantines in the world: it required travellers and goods coming from plague-stricken areas to isolate for thirty days (the 'trentino') before entering the city, in designated places such as the islet of Mrkan or the town of Cavtat. The period was later extended to forty days — 'quaranta', from which the word 'quarantine' comes. In time Ragusa built lazarettos (the buildings that still stand beside the Ploče Gate) to isolate new arrivals. It was a pioneering public health policy, in keeping with a city that as early as 1317 had a working pharmacy in the Franciscan monastery, still active today.
More remarkable still was its stance on slavery. In 1416 the Great Council banned the slave trade, especially the trafficking of people from the Balkans, punishing anyone who practised it severely: an abolition of the slave trade that was extremely rare and very early for the period, centuries before most of Europe. The institution of domestic slavery did not disappear at a stroke, but the ban on the trade marked an exceptional moral and legal milestone. These decisions — quarantine, a public pharmacy, a brake on slavery, a carefully designed system of government to prevent tyranny — reveal a small republic that was very conscious of itself, proud of its liberty and of a certain sense of civic organisation that set it apart in its time.
The hardest blow came from the earth. On the morning of 6 April 1667, an extremely violent earthquake shook Dubrovnik and its surroundings. In seconds much of the city collapsed: some 2,000 people died inside the walls and another thousand in the surrounding area, and almost all the public buildings, palaces and Gothic and Renaissance churches that had made the republic famous were destroyed. The shock was followed by fires that completed the ruin. It was a wound from which Ragusa, already in slow commercial decline, never fully recovered.
The city was rebuilt, but differently: in a plainer, more uniform baroque style, with the identical houses on the Stradun we see today, lower and more austere than the palaces that were lost. The republic went on existing, clinging to its liberty and its diplomacy, while Mediterranean trade lost ground to the new ocean routes to America and Asia. The end came with Napoleon. In May 1806, French troops under General Lauriston occupied the neutral city on the pretext of resting and resupplying, and never left; the Russo-Montenegrin siege that followed filled Dubrovnik with cannon fire. Two years later, on 31 January 1808, the French marshal Marmont proclaimed the abolition of the Republic of Ragusa, after more than four and a half centuries of independence. The city was absorbed into Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy and then into the Illyrian Provinces; with Napoleon fallen, the Congress of Vienna handed it in 1815 to the Austrian empire, within the Kingdom of Dalmatia, where it would remain until 1918.
After the First World War and the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Dubrovnik became part of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which would become Yugoslavia. Through the 20th century it lived as a quiet heritage jewel of the Dalmatian coast, and in 1979 UNESCO inscribed its old town on the World Heritage list, recognising its exceptional value. But the break-up of Yugoslavia brought war to its walls.
In 1991, after Croatia's declaration of independence, the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), with reservists from Montenegro and eastern Herzegovina, launched an offensive on the Dubrovnik region. The city, of hardly any military value and protected by its heritage status, was besieged and shelled for months. The most intense attacks on the historic centre came in October and November 1991 and culminated on 6 December that year, the so-called 'Black Friday', when more than 600 shells fell on the old city. Of the 824 buildings in the old town, some 563 — more than two-thirds — were hit by artillery; monuments, churches, palaces and roofs were damaged, and dozens of civilians died. The shelling of a World Heritage city shocked the world, and UNESCO placed Dubrovnik on its list of heritage in danger. Mount Srđ, above the city, was a key position in its defence. The siege was lifted in 1992.
The reconstruction was meticulous and exemplary: facades, churches and, above all, the characteristic tiled roofs were restored. That work left a trace that is still visible and very real: much of the new tiling, more orange and brighter, contrasts with the old, paler, weathered tiles that survived. From the walls or from Mount Srđ you can tell at a glance which roofs were repaired: a silent map of the shelling. In 1998, after the restoration, Dubrovnik came off the list of heritage in danger. Today it is one of the most visited cities in Europe — so much so that it has to manage overtourism — and, since 2023, it is fully part of the European Union with the euro and the Schengen area. The old republic that survived for centuries by cunning survived the war too, and its stone still stands above the Adriatic.