How to avoid the crowds in Dubrovnik

Watch the cruise calendar

The curse of the pharaohs has nothing on the curse of the Dubrovnik cruise crowds. Despite being one of the tiniest towns in Croatia, it’s one of the most popular cruise stops, with around 60 percent of all cruise passengers to Croatia unloaded here. The good news is, these beasts of burden are also creatures of habit and book into port a good year or two in advance. That means you can avoid them.

So check the cruise calendar. You’ll see that there’s a theme: boats pile in during late May, July, August and early September – sometimes six ships a day – and ease off in other months. You can drill that down even further. Most cruise ships don’t dock overnight in Dubrovnik, so even in high summer it’ll only be hectic from nine to five, before the thousands of day-trippers sidle off to flatten another city.

These shoulder times are the best time to be in town for both you and Dubrovnik. You can snag a restaurant table on the steps of the Old Town, watch the swifts swirl around the rooftops at twilight, go for a sunrise swim in empty waters, or salute the sunset at a cliff-side bar flagged only by a door in the wall.

Powell Ettinger, founder of our partners the Small Cruise Ship Collection, says timing is everything: “If you go early in the morning or later in the afternoon or evening, then you can avoid the crowds to a certain extent. There are still lots of people around in the evenings, but you don’t usually get the overcrowding from the big ships.”

Learn about the war

It’s a sad fact that many tourists don’t have much of a stomach for learning about the war that unexpectedly hit Dubrovnik during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Many want to see the beauty and learn about fictional histories, without questioning why roofs are a patchwork of old and new tiles or why rose gardens have replaced missing houses.

But you won’t truly understand Dubrovnik without learning about the war – and its best museums are some of the most under-visited parts of the city. Go to War Photo Limited, a gallery on a mission to educate people about war photojournalism and the myth of victory. Or use a holiday company that uses local guides who are able to explain to you the significance of the toothy gaps in the city you see from the walls.

Remember that Dubrovnik is bigger than the Old Town

Take the cable car up to Srd Hill for sunset, where long-range views across Dubrovnik and the Elaphiti Islands are laid out almost half a kilometre below. Some holidays will put you up in Lapad, a pine-coated suburb and peninsula between the Old Town and Gruz port. You’ll find tourists packed sunlounger-to-sunlounger on its pebble beaches in summer, but between late September and May it’s a real pleasure to trace the path that sneaks between pine trees and the sea.