For years I have dreamt of visiting Dubrovnik. Seduced by the iconic pictures of St John’s fortress imposingly towering over the Adriatic while a picture postcard beach shimmers in the foreground.
Well now I’ve managed it! Having just spent an incredible but all to short week in Croatia,as usual making a mad dash around a country with far too much to see and far too little time to see it!
Starting and ending in Dubrovnik, our whistle stop tour covered over 800 miles and included heading north upto Split and further afield to the stunning national parks of Plitvice and Krka, a brief stop in Trogir and a hair raising jaunt into Bosnia to see the beautiful town of Mostar.
But let’s start with Dubrovnik. A stunning old town hewn from shining white stone that is sadly overwhelmed by endless tour groups that pour forth from the leviathan cruise ships that hover in the ports.
We arrived on a rather overcast day with the threat of rain never too far away. Nevertheless you can still see how gobsmackingly lovely the place is.
Our first apartment was the family run Villa Dard. Set on the hillside above the old town it is a ten minute walk to reach all the sites (although it is a steep climb back up via lots of steps)
First stop, via Pile Gate, was the fashionable and stunning main street – Stradun.
The limestone-paved pedestrian street runs for about 300 metres through the Old Town and is blindingly bright in the sunlight (not that we saw any for the first few days!)
The old town is incredible, almost unreal in its beauty, and almost feels staged like a film set (indeed we only just missed the infamous nude Games of Thrones scene that was filmed a few days before we arrived)
To aid us with our tour we headed to the tasty Dolce Vita ice cream parlour for a dollop of loveliness.
The first day was warm but cloudy and the second day it positively chucked it down! Not to be daunted we donned our fashionable pac a macs (!) and sallied forth to explore some of the little back streets of the town. More of that later!