Dubrovnik Old City

The old city of Dubrovnik is one of the most completely preserved medieval cities in the world, its entire interior a grid of stone-paved streets, terracotta-roofed houses, and baroque churches contained within a continuous fortification circuit completed in the sixteenth century and never significantly altered since, giving the city an integrity that is exceptionally rare among European urban centres.

Entering through the Pile Gate, visitors pass under a carved effigy of Saint Blaise, the city's patron, and walk the tree-lined lane of the Placa toward the central Stradun, the main street whose flat stone slabs were laid in 1498 and have been worn smooth by centuries of footsteps leading to the clock tower at the eastern end where a double-headed Maltese eagle watches over the city gate.

The walls themselves are the dominant presence, running 1,940 metres along the sea cliffs and landward approach, reinforced with towers and bastions built after the catastrophic 1667 earthquake that destroyed most of the city's public buildings and killed several thousand of its citizens, with reconstruction taking most of the eighteenth century to complete.

The Republic of Ragusa, Dubrovnik's governing body from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth century, was one of the most sophisticated diplomatic and commercial entities in the Mediterranean, maintaining a complex network of trade agreements with the Ottoman Empire, the Italian city-states, and the major European powers, and operating a maritime empire of merchant ships that covered every sea known to early modern navigation.

Within the walls, the Sponza Palace now houses the archives of the Republic, containing documents dating from the twelfth century that record trade agreements, diplomatic correspondence, and household accounts in a remarkable unbroken institutional record spanning nearly eight hundred years.

The Rector's Palace, now the cultural history museum, was the seat of the elected rector who served a one-month term and was forbidden to leave the palace during his tenure, a constitutional arrangement designed to prevent any individual from accumulating personal power in a state that considered itself a republic in the Venetian mould.

The city walls circuit, completed by walking the full perimeter on the upper walkway, offers views over the red-tiled roofs and the sea beyond that make the global reputation of Dubrovnik immediately legible, with the island of Lokrum visible close offshore and the barren mountains of the Pelješac peninsula forming a dramatic backdrop across the channel.

The Pile Gate and the Minceta Tower at the northern and western extremities of the circuit respectively mark the two extremes of the walled city, linked by the Stradun and the network of narrow stone lanes that cross and re-cross the old city in a pattern that rewards those who wander without a fixed destination.

The walls and fortifications are the most complete medieval urban defences surviving anywhere in Europe, and the intact city plan reveals eight centuries of continuous urban life within them.

The Republic of Ragusa archives and the Rector's Palace together document a republican political tradition in south-eastern Europe that predates most comparable European institutions.

The setting — a medieval city built on a limestone outcrop with the Adriatic on three sides and mountains behind — is geographically dramatic and visually unmatched in the Mediterranean.