We’re off on another adventure! The main inspiration for this trip is to visit Rowan in Croatia, where they are in the middle of a semester studying abroad. Their program shuts down (including the housing) for a week long spring break right after Easter, so we plan to take advantage of this opportunity to go on a road trip with them. They are located on an island in the northwest, so before our rendezvous we wanted to take a bit of time to see a city in the southeast we’ve always wanted to explore: Dubrovnik. (Some of our readers may know this as the real-life setting for King’s Landing in the Game of Thrones TV series. We’re not huge GoT fans ourselves, but the gift shops here sure have jumped on the bandwagon. Fortunately the old city with its intact wall system is plenty impressive whether you followed the show or not.)

Our lodgings are actually within the old city itself, just across the street from one of the massive external walls. The whole town is built on a mountainside, so the narrow pedestrian-only streets are quite steep and often feature flights of stairs rising one after the other. Of course, our destination is on the uphill side — not so great for lugging baggage, but amply compensated with great views in all directions.

Being longtime fans of stone fortifications, a tour of the city walls was naturally our first choice activity. Guidebooks warn visitors to be wary of the hot sun and massive crowds, especially when cruise ships are in port (sometimes up to five visiting per day!). Conveniently, being here in April means that we miss both of those delights. The weather was far from hot, and though we did feel a few drops of rain, we were well prepared for it — and they may even have helped keep the other tourists away. The walls make a complete circuit around the entire old city, and the ticket counter recommends allowing at least an hour for the tour. We took more than two and loved every minute of it. Seeing the streets from so many different viewpoints really helped us get a sense of the place.

One observation that surprised us a little in comparison with other walled cities was the amount of open space we saw. Many of the buildings have gardens or other plots nearby, and the photo above shows an area just below the walls that is designated for public recreation. In other places, some of the land simply remains in ruins or sits otherwise unused. With Dubrovnik’s increasing popularity as a tourist destination, it seems likely that a lot of this open space will be put to use in the near future.

The oldest remaining fortifications of the city date back more than 1000 years. The bulk of the current city walls were built in the 1300s and 1400s, with further modifications over the next few centuries (particularly so when cannons became commonplace, and the defenses were modified to include gun casements). More recently, the Austro-Hungarian Empire made further changes when they gained control of the city in the 19th century.