Metravel city quest
City Dubrovnik: free walking route “quest: the republic of one word — Libertas” along the sights. 12 points. Approximately 2 h 30 min. Quests and legends
There is an Adriatic city-state that stood for five centuries between two empires, Venice and the Ottoman Porte, and almost never drew its sword. The Republic of Dubrovnik, known to the world then as Ragusa, was tiny: a city, a narrow coastal strip and a few islands. Against its giant neighbours, it had no chance in open battle. So it chose other weapons: diplomacy, a merchant fleet and the wisdom to pay tribute in time rather than pay in blood.
It worked so well that Ragusa remained independent from 1358 to 1808. Napoleon dissolved it as easily as sultans and doges had failed to conquer it for centuries. In 1416, the Republic of Dubrovnik also became one of Europe's first to outlaw the slave trade, almost four centuries before this became normal elsewhere. One word explained the republic to itself: Libertas, freedom. It was embroidered on a white flag, carved in stone above Lovrijenac Fortress's gate, and still rises above the city every summer on Orlando's Column's flagpole, opening the Dubrovnik Summer Festival.
Today you will cross the entire Old Town, from its main gate to the old port. At each step, you will find traces of this remarkable idea: a free city surviving by intelligence rather than force. Libertas will appear again and again, in stone, statues and the rules people lived by here for six centuries.
What to do: 1) Read the story and task at each stop. 2) Find the place on the map and walk to it. 3) Look around and answer the question.
This compact walking route crosses an Old Town you could traverse in twenty minutes, but we will stop along the way. We start at the main gate in the western wall, Pile Gate, where the mainland ends and the free city begins.
The route points in order — what these places are and why they are interesting. Tasks and answers stay inside the quest.
You stand before the only land entrance through which everyone entered Ragusa for centuries: merchants, ambassadors, pilgrims and rare conquerors who never managed to stay. The gate is really double.
Through the gate, your eyes immediately meet a low stone dome, the first sight every traveller here has had for six centuries. Large Onofrio's Fountain was built in 1438–1440 to a design by Neapolitan master Onofrio della Cava, the engineer hired by the republic to solve a chief problem for a city hemmed in from the land: water.
Left of the fountain is the Franciscan monastery's unassuming entrance. Do not pass it by: behind these walls lies one of Dubrovnik's most remarkable places.
Leave the monastery onto the broad, pale street: Stradun, or Placa, Dubrovnik's main axis. Hard to believe, but water once splashed where you stand.
Stradun leads onto Luža Square, the former republic's political heart. In the centre stands a stone column with a knight in full armour: Orlando, or Roland from the medieval ‘Song of Roland’, one of Christian Europe's most revered chivalric heroes.
Directly opposite Orlando stands an ornate Baroque church dedicated to the saint who welcomed you twice at Pile Gate. Venetian architect Marino Gropelli built the present church in 1715, taking Venice's San Maurizio Church as his model.
Beside the church, on the square's corner, stands a building blending Gothic and Renaissance as naturally as can be: severe pointed windows on the lower windowed level sit beneath elegant Renaissance ones on the upper level. Sponza Palace was built in 1516–1522 to a design by Paskoje Miličević, with sculptural decoration by the Andrijić brothers.
Walk a few steps further across the square from Sponza Palace. A slender thirty-metre tower rises above the roofs.
From the bell tower, follow the street down to a low building with an elegant ground-floor arcade, the residence of the republic's head, the Rector. Power was designed here so nobody could seize it for long.
A few steps from the Rector's Palace stands the cathedral, although this is not the first building on the site. Local legend says that in 1192, English King Richard the Lionheart was returning from the Third Crusade when a terrible storm caught him near Lokrum island.
Go down from the cathedral to the water. Here, in the little rounded bay beneath St John's Fortress, was the port that fed the whole republic.
An optional stop: right by the old port, St John's Fortress holds one of the three entrances to Dubrovnik's famous walls. They form a continuous two-kilometre stone ring around the Old Town, with towers, bastions and views of sea and tiled roofs that draw visitors from halfway around the world.
This route is part of Metravel city quests. Below are the other quests in this city and cities with quests nearby.