The History of Dubrovnik, Croatia

Dubrovnik is included on almost all of our Croatia cruises and Croatia tours — and for good reason. Few places in Europe pack so much history into such a compact space. The Old Town is entirely walkable, the city walls are among the best-preserved in the world, and the history behind it all goes back over 1,300 years.

Visiting Dubrovnik on a Small Ship Cruise

You may have read about Dubrovnik’s crowd problem — and it’s real, but it mostly affects visitors arriving on large ocean cruise ships, some carrying several thousand passengers at a time. When those ships are in port, the Pile Gate and Stradun can become genuinely unpleasant during the middle of the day.

Our cruises are a different thing entirely. We sell small ship itineraries carrying around 36–40 passengers — vessels that feel more like a private charter than a floating resort. And the way those itineraries are structured means you’re in Dubrovnik at the right time, not the wrong one.

If your cruise finishes in Dubrovnik (as most of our one-way itineraries do), the ship arrives in the afternoon. You’ll have a guided walking tour of the Old Town in the late afternoon, then the evening is yours — dinner in the city, a walk along the walls at dusk, or a drink on the waterfront before heading back to the ship. It’s a memorable way to end a week on the water, and the Old Town in the late afternoon and evening is genuinely quieter and more pleasant than it is at noon.

If your cruise starts in Dubrovnik, you’ll have a guided morning tour on the Sunday before the ship departs — again, a time when the big ship crowds haven’t arrived yet.

Either way, you get Dubrovnik at its best.

What You’ll See in the Old Town

The city walls are the centrepiece for most visitors. A full circuit is roughly 2km and takes about an hour at an easy pace — the views over the rooftops and out to the Adriatic are genuinely unlike anything else in Croatia. From up on the walls you can also pick out the sections of rebuilt roof tiling that mark where shelling hit during the 1991–92 siege. Most visitors don’t notice unless they know to look.

The Stradun — the broad limestone promenade running the full length of the Old Town — connects the Pile Gate on the west to the Ploce Gate on the east, passing the Orlando Column, the Clock Tower, and Sponza Palace along the way. Sponza is one of the few buildings inside the walls to survive the 1667 earthquake largely intact: a 16th-century merchant customs house that now houses the city archive.

The Rector’s Palace sits just south of the Stradun near the Old Port. This was the seat of Ragusa’s chief magistrate — a position that rotated every month to stop any single person accumulating too much power, which tells you a lot about how the republic ran itself. The building is now a museum.

At the western end of the Stradun, the Franciscan Monastery houses a pharmacy that has been operating continuously since 1317. The monastery cloister is quiet and worth a few minutes away from the main drag.

The cable car to Mount Srđ departs from just outside the Pile Gate. The ride takes a few minutes and the view from the top — looking down over the whole city, the Old Port, and the Elafiti Islands — is one of the better perspectives on Dubrovnik you’ll find. Worth doing if time allows.

A Brief History

Dubrovnik was founded in the 7th century by refugees from Epidaurum — the Roman settlement now known as Cavtat, about 20km to the southeast — after it was destroyed during Slavic and Avar raids. The new settlement was established on a small rocky island just off the coast. Over time, a Slavic community developed on the wooded mainland opposite, and the two eventually merged. The narrow channel between them was filled in, and that flat limestone surface became the Stradun.

Known for most of its independent history as Ragusa, the city grew into one of the most capable small states in medieval Europe. By the 15th and 16th centuries the Republic of Ragusa was operating a merchant fleet that rivalled Venice, running sophisticated diplomatic relationships with both the Ottoman Empire and the Christian powers of Europe, and maintaining an internal system of governance specifically designed to prevent autocracy. Rectors served for one month. No armed ships were permitted in the harbour. The republic managed to stay out of most of the major wars of the era by being more useful to everyone as a neutral trading partner than as an enemy.

In 1377 Ragusa established one of Europe’s first organised quarantine stations — a 30-day isolation facility on a nearby island for ships arriving from plague-affected ports. The quarantine building on the harbour (the Lazarettos), dating from the early 17th century, still stands today.

On 6 April 1667 a major earthquake struck the city and killed a significant portion of the population. The fires that followed destroyed most of what had been built. Reconstruction took decades and gave the city much of its Baroque character — which is why the architecture inside the walls reads as more uniform than you’d expect from a place with a 1,300-year history.

Napoleon ended the republic in 1806. The city passed through French then Austrian control before becoming part of Yugoslavia after World War I. The name Dubrovnik — from the Croatian word for oak — had been in use among the Slavic population throughout, and eventually replaced Ragusa in official use.

UNESCO World Heritage listing came in 1979. The timing turned out to matter: when Yugoslav Federal Army and Montenegrin forces besieged the city during the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991–92, the international profile of the UNESCO listing helped generate the pressure that eventually ended the bombardment. Restoration work was extensive and thorough, funded partly through international support, and most visitors today wouldn’t know where to look for the repairs.

Crowds and the Best Time to Visit

As noted above, if you’re travelling with us, the crowd question largely takes care of itself — our itineraries put you in the Old Town in the late afternoon, evening, or Sunday morning, all of which are well outside the peak window when large ships are in port.

For independent visitors, or for people spending extra days in Dubrovnik before or after a cruise, May, early June, and September are consistently the best months. The weather is warm, the sea is swimmable from late May onward, and the city is manageable. July and August are hot, expensive, and very busy — still spectacular, but you’ll need to time your visits to the walls and the Stradun carefully. Early morning (before 9am) is the most reliable way to beat the crowds in peak season.

There’s also a useful tool worth knowing about: the City of Dubrovnik runs a visitor prediction app that uses real data to forecast how busy the Old Town will be on a given day. If you’re planning independent time in the city and want to pick the quieter hours, it’s worth a look.