Dubrovnik and the Croatian Coast: Old Walls to Island Dinners

The Republic That Kept Its Walls

Dubrovnik was not always Croatian. For five centuries, from 1358 to 1808, it was the Republic of Ragusa: an independent maritime city-state that traded with everyone, owed nothing to anyone, and built the walls to prove it. The walls that ring the old city today run 1,940 metres in a continuous circuit, reaching 25 metres at their highest point. They were built primarily between the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the earthquake of 1667, a period the Ragusans called their Golden Age. The earthquake destroyed most of the Gothic and Renaissance buildings inside. What you walk through now is largely Baroque, rebuilt on the same streets.

Fort Minčeta, at the city's northwestern corner, was completed in 1464 to designs by Juraj Dalmatinac, the Dalmatian architect who also designed the cathedral baptistery in Šibenik. It is a massive round tower that anchors the wall where the city meets the hillside. From its top, the Adriatic spreads south and east in both directions. On a clear morning, before ten, before the tour groups arrive, you can walk the full circuit of the walls in ninety minutes and have this view entirely to yourself.

The Old City Logic

The Stradun is the main limestone thoroughfare that divides the old city, running five hundred metres from the Pile Gate to the clock tower at the eastern end. It was paved in 1468 and has not changed its route since. The marble is worn smooth. It reflects the light in a way that makes the street look different every hour, which is why the photographers are always there at seven in the morning and again at six in the evening.

The Old City is best understood as two cities sharing the same walls. One city belongs to the day and the tour groups. The other belongs to the evening: the konoba restaurants tucked into the side streets off the Stradun, the tables set up in the small squares, the aperitif hour that begins around seven and slides into dinner at nine without any formal transition. This second city is worth waiting for.

Konoba Dubrava, outside the walls on the Lapad peninsula, prepares dishes under the peka: a cast-iron bell placed over meat or octopus with embers piled on top, slow-cooked for hours. It is the oldest Dalmatian cooking method. The result is different from anything grilled or roasted. The flavour concentrates in a way that requires no explanation.

The Ferry to Korcula

The island of Korcula lies two and a half hours north of Dubrovnik by catamaran. It is long and narrow, forested with Aleppo pine, with a walled medieval town at its eastern tip that was built on a herringbone grid so the streets would funnel the summer breeze while deflecting the bura, the north wind that arrives in winter. Marco Polo is said to have been born here in 1254, a claim that Korcula maintains with confidence.

The restaurants in Korcula Town are concentrated in the grid of streets around the Cathedral of St Mark, built between the 13th and 16th centuries from local limestone. Konoba Adio Mare and Konoba Biankura, run by three brothers including a fisherman and a fishmonger, both serve black risotto: crni rižot, made with squid ink and cuttlefish, dark and briny and served without ceremony. You eat it at a table in the stone street. The light from the harbour comes in at an angle. The wine is local Pošip, a white grape grown only on the Dalmatian islands, pale and mineral.

What the Climate Asks

July and August on the Dalmatian coast run to thirty-five degrees in the afternoon. The old city's stone absorbs the heat and releases it slowly: the streets are hot until midnight. The solution the locals arrived at centuries ago is the same solution the architecture uses: keep the openings small during the day, open everything at night, move slowly.

The evening wardrobe on the coast follows the same logic. Light fabric. Nothing that holds the heat. A dress for a konoba dinner in the old city, or a table on a Korcula terrace above the harbour, requires the kind of construction that works in thirty-degree evenings without anything underneath it that makes the evening more difficult. Medical-grade silicone covers from Korea. Less than half a millimetre at the edge. Invisible under any fabric weight, which on the Dalmatian coast in August means silk or linen or nothing much. The adhesive releases cleanly when you are back at the hotel and the night has finally decided to cool.

For building this kind of foundation under the dresses the coast requires, see what to wear under a backless dress. The ultra-thin silicone covers were designed for exactly this kind of evening.

Lokrum and the Shore

Lokrum Island is fifteen minutes from the old city by ferry. Pine forest, a botanical garden established in 1959, peacocks that have been feral on the island since the 19th century. No one lives there permanently. The Benedictine monastery that once occupied the island was abandoned in 1798 when Napoleon dissolved the order; the monks placed a curse on anyone who tried to own the island, and subsequent owners did have unusual bad luck. The Habsburgs converted the monastery ruins into a summer residence in 1859. It still stands.

You swim off the rocks on Lokrum's eastern shore, where the water is clear and cold even in August. The ferry back to the old city takes fifteen minutes. You are at a table at a konoba by eight. This is the daily logic of the coast: the water, then the dinner.

When to Come

June and September are the months. July and August are when Dubrovnik belongs to everyone at once, which changes the quality of the old city materially. The Stradun in August holds six thousand visitors per hour at peak times. The ferry to Korcula is full. The wall walk requires patience.

In June, the water is already warm. The old city is navigable. The konobas have space. The ferry to Korcula leaves with room on the upper deck, where the morning light comes in off the water as the boat moves north through the islands, past Mljet and its two saltwater lakes, past the vineyards on Pelješac where Dingač is grown: the thick-skinned red grape that produces the best wine in the country. You pour a glass of it at dinner. The evening on a stone terrace above the harbour is the reward for coming in June rather than August. It costs the same. It is not the same.