Dubrovnik Croatia Old Town holiday vacation with kids -

We went to Dubrovnik for our summer holiday this year! We don’t usually do beachy summer holidays, but decided to give it a try this year. I’ve heard so many good things about Croatia as a holiday destination, and have been wanting to go for ages, and when Croatia recently joined the Euro that was the push we needed. The kids have also become aware of/ interested in Eastern European countries through the magic of Eurovision. Milo had to do a presentation about a country at school this year and he chose Croatia as well.

i tried to make one super long blog post with everything, but squarespace had a breakdown and won’t let me upload any more pictures into it, which is probably just as well. So I’m breaking it up for this first part am talking about Dubrovnik Old town, and some general observations on what the city is like to visit.

Where we stayed

We flew to Dubrovnik with easyjet and we stayed in an Airbnb in the city. II would definitely recommend, its about 20 minutes walk to the Old Town. We stayed for 6 days (meant to be 7, but there was a storm in Dubrovnik so we couldn’t land and got diverted to Rome, and then easyjet fully stuffed up managing that and we ended up sitting inside the plane on the airfield unable to get off and then standing about inside the airport waiting for them to tell us what was going on. Was awful. Anyway!)

The view from the airbnb terrace at sunset

Getting Around

We got a taxi to and from the airport, mainly because we were absolutely shattered after our Rome adventure and getting up at 4am two days in a row. There is an airport bus as well, which drops you in the centre so would have been a wee walk to the airbnb for us, but definitely doable. For four people it was hardly anything extra to get the taxi though

I Dubrovnik we walked everywhere because I think walking pace is the best way of taking in any place. On a car or even a bike you’re going too fast to really notice things, and need to pay attention to the roads, bnot whats around them.

The city is on a pretty steep hill and the roads going horizontally across the hill are all connected by by little lanes of steps. You definitely need a base level of fitness to get round!

We didn’t get any buses, but there are a lot of them for such a small place, and they’re frequent. I think they cost €2.50 if bought on the bus or €1.70 if bought in advance at a tobacconists.

Dubrovnik is a weird mix of streets. There are a few of these massive ones that funnel all the traffic. These have often ridiculously narrow pavements (like, honestly, 40cms) or sometimes none at all. You are obviously not meant to walk on them. But the rest of the roads outside of the Old Town (which is completely pedestrianised) make just brilliant natural low traffic neighbourhoods by virtue of being *just* a car width wide with barely any crossing places. They’re all open to cars, but you would not want to drive in unless you actually want to be somewhere on that road. The taxi that took us had to push in his mirror at one point to get through.

This is the street our airbnb was on. You would not actually think looking at this photo that a car could go down it!

The Old Town

The main sight in Dubrovnik is the Old Town, the medieval historic centre surrounded by walls you can walk on. We didn’t walk on the walls, cos its 35 euros per person, and there are plenty other high points with good views. You do also get some museum bits with this and public transport with the wall tickets so might be good for some people. Inside the old town there is one wide central marble avenue, and a warren of small streets and squares.

It’s incredibly well preserved and maintained, and so clean. I don’t know if this is because of Game of Thrones (they filmed Kings Landing here) or because a lot of it was restored quite recently after it was heavily shelled in the wars following the break up of Yugoslavia in the nineties. Its very very busy with tourists, especially in the mornings (for some reason after 3 it got a bit more reasonable), but there are still quiet/empty streets round the edges too. There are restaurants in pretty much all the lanes. And the whole thing is completely pedestrianised.

There are loads of pigeons that randomly swarm from roof to roof

Ploce gate on the East side of the old town

Random round window, not part of any particular building

Final thoughts

One thing to say is that Dubrovnik is VERY touristy, the whole economy seems to be set up for visitors, and there are lots of cruise ships that stop here as well. It’s a nice mix of nationalities though, which makes it somehow more bearable. Also seems to be on the itinery of the travelling young Australians, lots of those. But very few Americans. We also saw so so many different countries cars. I suppose there are a lot of countries in that corner of Europe. I am really keen to go to Zagreb now though and experience a bit more of the normal Croatia.

Next post I will tell you about beaches!