The Old City of Dubrovnik, on Croatia’s southern Adriatic coast, joined UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1979 for its medieval architecture and fortifications: a walled town ringed by about 1,940 metres of continuous stone walls up to roughly 25 metres high, built mainly between the 13th and 17th centuries. Inside stand the Rector’s Palace, the Sponza Palace and a Baroque townscape rebuilt after the 1667 earthquake. The town was the capital of the Republic of Ragusa, a self-governing maritime state from 1358 to 1808, and it was placed on UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger in 1991 after the Yugoslav People’s Army shelled it, staying there until 1998.
7th Century to 1205: Refugees from Epidaurum Settle the Rock of Lausa
The Byzantine emperor Constantine VII’s De Administrando Imperio (about 950) says Ragusa was founded in the 7th century by refugees from Epidaurum (today’s Cavtat), about 15 km south, after Slavs and Avars destroyed it. They settled on a rocky island called Lausa. Excavations in 2007 found an 8th-century Byzantine basilica, and coins from the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC near the old port hint at earlier settlement.
Across a marshy channel lay a Slavic settlement in the oak woods, source of the name Dubrovnik (from the Proto-Slavic word for oak), first written in the Charter of Ban Kulin of 1189. The two merged, the channel was filled, and the strip became the Stradun, the 300-metre main street from the Pile Gate to the Ploče Gate. The southern half of the Old Town sits on the old island; the northern half climbs the mainland slope.
Under Byzantine protection the town survived a 15-month Saracen siege in 866–867, lifted when Emperor Basil I sent a fleet. Later chroniclers tied the cult of Saint Blaise to a vision in 971 that warned of a Venetian attack, and his statue still stands over both main gates. According to tradition, Richard the Lionheart helped pay for a Romanesque cathedral after surviving a shipwreck off Lokrum in 1192 on his way home from the Third Crusade; its remains lie beneath the present cathedral.
1205–1358: Venetian Counts, the 1272 Statute and the Fire of 1296
After the Fourth Crusade, Venice sent a Venetian count to rule Ragusa and left the council structure it kept for six centuries: a Minor Council from 1238 and a Senate from 1253. The Statute of 1272 regulated town planning and quarantine and ordered ramparts on the outlying slopes.
On the night of 16 August 1296 a fire destroyed most of the city, and the plan drawn up for the rebuilding still governs the Old Town: steep, straight lanes rising from the Stradun inside the outline the walls would follow. The commune bought Lastovo in 1240 and Ston with the Pelješac peninsula in 1333. A medical service started in 1301, and the Franciscan pharmacy by the Pile Gate opened in 1317; it is the oldest in Europe still operating.
1358–1667: Libertas, the Ottoman Tribute and the Ring of Walls
The Peace Treaty of Zadar in 1358 ended Venetian rule and made Ragusa a self-governing vassal of the Hungarian crown. From 1382 it also paid an annual tribute to the Ottoman sultans, an arrangement that bought access to Balkan and Black Sea trade and lasted until 1804. Power rested entirely with the nobility. The Major Council of noblemen elected the Rector, who served for just one month and could not stand again for two years, a rule meant to stop any one family from taking control.
Most landmarks date from this period. The Neapolitan engineer Onofrio della Cava completed the city’s aqueduct in 1438, ending in the Large and Small Onofrio’s Fountains, and rebuilt the Rector’s Palace in Gothic style after a fire in 1435. Paskoje Miličević designed the Pile Gate bridges (1471), the harbour, and the Sponza Palace (1516–1522), the customs house and mint.
Fear of the Ottomans after 1453 drove most of the present walls, built between the early 15th and later 16th centuries. The round Minčeta Tower, the high point of the landward defences, began in 1463 as a square fort; Michelozzo rebuilt it as a round tower, and Giorgio da Sebenico (Juraj Dalmatinac) finished it in 1464. On the land side the walls are 4 to 6 metres thick; on the sea side they are 1.5 to 5 metres. The circuit has three round and 14 square towers, five bastions, the Revelin Fortress by the Ploče Gate, St John’s Fortress over the harbour and Fort Bokar. Outside the west wall, the free-standing Lovrijenac fortress stands 37 metres above the sea. Its gate bears the Republic’s motto, Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro (“Liberty is not well sold for all the gold”); its walls are 12 metres thick facing outwards but 60 centimetres facing the city.
The town’s wealth paid for all of this. It came from shipping, from a carrying trade between the Ottoman Balkans and Italy, and for a time from a role in the Balkan slave trade. The Republic banned the trade in slaves from Slavic Balkan lands in 1416 (some accounts give 1418), though slavery itself was not outlawed. Its flag carried the word Libertas. A quarantine hospital opened in 1377, and the playwright Marin Držić (1508–1567) and poet Ivan Gundulić (1589–1638) made the city a centre of Croatian literature.
6 April 1667: The Earthquake That Made Baroque Dubrovnik
At about a quarter to nine on the morning of 6 April 1667 an earthquake lasting between 8 and 15 seconds levelled most of the city. A tsunami flooded the port, and fires burned for almost 20 days. Death tolls vary by source. One estimate puts them at 3,000 to 5,000; the historian Robin Harris gives around 2,000 in the city and up to 1,000 elsewhere in the Republic. The Rector and about half the Major Council died.
The walls survived almost untouched, and that is why the city was rebuilt on the same site rather than on the Lapad peninsula, which had been considered. The Sponza Palace and the Rector’s Palace on Luža Square were among the few buildings left standing. The rest of the Old Town was rebuilt in a plainer Baroque style under a new building law. Every house on the Stradun was given the same plan: a shop on the ground floor, with door and window under one stone arch, living rooms on the floors above, and the kitchen in the loft so that a fire would not spread. The new cathedral, attributed to Andrea Buffalini, was begun around 1671 and finished in 1713 by Ilija Katičić. In 1699, at the Treaty of Karlowitz, the weakened Republic gave two strips of coast to the Ottomans as buffers against Venice. One of them, at Neum, is still Bosnia and Herzegovina’s only outlet to the sea.
1806–1918: Marmont, the “Duke of Ragusa”, and Habsburg Dalmatia
French troops under General Jacques Lauriston entered the neutral Republic on 27 May 1806, supposedly to rest on their way to the Bay of Kotor, and occupied it. In 1808 Marshal Auguste Marmont abolished the Republic and took the title Duke of Ragusa. By then it had about 30,000 people, of whom about 5,000 lived inside the walls. A rising that began in June 1813, backed by Captain William Hoste’s ships HMS Bacchante and HMS Saracen, forced the French garrison to capitulate on 27 January 1814. The next day Austrian troops under General Todor Milutinović entered with British forces through the Pile Gate while Ragusan insurgents waited outside the Ploče Gate, and on 30 January Milutinović ordered the last Rector, Sabo Giorgi, to haul down the flag of Saint Blaise. The Congress of Vienna gave the territory to Austria.
Under the Habsburgs, Dubrovnik was a provincial town in the Kingdom of Dalmatia. Two extra gates were cut through the walls, and the Buža Gate on the north side dates from the early 1900s. A tram ran from 1910 to 1970. Because the town had been bypassed by money and industry, the old fabric stayed largely as the 1667 rebuilding had left it.
1979–1998: UNESCO Listing, the Siege and the Danger List
Tourism grew after the Second World War. The Dubrovnik Summer Festival began in 1950, with Hamlet staged at Lovrijenac becoming its signature production, and the Adriatic Highway from Rijeka opened in 1965. The Old Town was demilitarised in the early 1970s so that it would never be a military target. In 1979, at UNESCO’s third session, the Old City was inscribed on the World Heritage List together with Split’s Diocletian’s Palace and the Plitvice Lakes.
Listing did not protect it. On 1 October 1991, after Croatia declared independence, the Yugoslav People’s Army attacked Dubrovnik and began a siege that lasted seven months. The heaviest bombardment came on 6 December, killing 19 people. The Croatian Red Cross counted 114 civilians killed during the siege, among them the poet Milan Milišić. The walled town took 650 artillery hits, and 56 percent of Dubrovnik’s buildings were damaged to some degree. UNESCO moved the site to its List of World Heritage in Danger in 1991. The siege was lifted in May 1992; the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal later jailed General Pavle Strugar for seven and a half years.
Most of the repair work was done between 1995 and 1999, following UNESCO guidelines, with damaged buildings repaired in their original style. The new roofs still stand out as brighter patches when seen from high points around the city, and a chart near the city gate marks every recorded hit. In 1998 UNESCO took the Old City off the danger list, a year after Plitvice. Its case is now often cited alongside other endangered World Heritage Sites as one that recovered.
2010s to Today: King’s Landing, Cruise Ships and Wheeled-Luggage Rules
The next pressure came from visitors. From its second season, HBO’s Game of Thrones used the walls, Lovrijenac and the Old Town’s streets as King’s Landing, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi also filmed here. In 2019 the walls alone drew more than 1.2 million visitors. By 2018 the city was staggering cruise-ship arrivals across the week to spread the crowds. In 2023 the mayor announced a ban on wheeled suitcases on the Old Town’s paving and closed a noisy bar terrace on the Stradun.
The Sponza Palace now holds the State Archives, with documents from 1022, and the Rector’s Palace has housed a museum since 1872. For how the town sits on the coast and why its harbour mattered, see our guide to the Adriatic Sea. For the country it now anchors at the far southern end of Dalmatia, read the Croatia country guide.