However, the most pleasurable way to reach Dubrovnik is from the sea by regular ship, or rather ferryboat line which arrives in the afternoon hours. It's been so ever since the Habsburg emperors' times. That afternoon ship comes to the port in Gruž all the way from Rijeka, stopping in Zadar, Split, Hvar and Korcula. Dubrovnik is very well connected with Italy and has regular ship line to Bari in Apulia. However, the majority of the ships and powerboats are not coming from Bari, but from Ancona and Pescara so the main destinations for these ships are Zadar and Split, Croatian ports north of Dubrovnik.
During the summer a number of big tourist ships cruising.

All kinds of vehicles have been forbidden to traffic in the old city core for decades already. That is why the Dubrovnik's walls are sur¬rounded by numerous but not always good parking lots. There's not enough parking lots, though, for all of those who want to come as close as possible to Gruz. The best-known parking lot is Tenis-Tabor, just beneath the northern city walls by the gate of Buze where, in the first half of the 201!1 century, a tennis court used to be, and where the donkeys that carried goods for the city market were tied up in Tabor at the foot of the walls. A small and elegant parking lot at Pile is a very good one, as well as Park Gradac, an elegant and very useful, with a wonderful view at the sea and the Lovrjenac tower, but not easily accessed because of a very narrow lane that leads to it. Another city parking lot is at the very foot of the hill Srd, where a Zicara started. That small but spectacular cableway, which took tourists to the Imperial citadel on Srd from which one could have the most beautiful view of the city and its surroundings, before it was destroyed by aggressive Yugoslav aircrafts when they bombarded Dubrovnik.
The easiest way to move through Dubrovnik is by its yellow buses with the word Libertas across, the sacred word for Dubrovnik citizens which was taken from their banner. Actually, the public transport enterprise took it as their name. In the past the enterprise had even ten trams, which slowly but proudly dragged their open and closed carriages from Pile via Boninova to Lapad and Gruz and back. Electric tram transport was introduced 1910, which was less than ten years after the city was electrified. The ancient tram was brutally and mindlessly abolished sixty years later after a traffic accident at the stop in Pile. No traces of tram tracks remained today and all of many tram stops that had been built along the track were flattened, although some of them had secession glassworks. There are only memories that remained in memoir records and poems among which the most beautiful one is by Luko Paljetak who remembers the instructions in Check language, which children, standing by a driver in the front of a tram, used to read and learn by heart. Dubrovnik tram was one of the last and definitely most popular symbols of the K.u.K. Monarchy in Southern Europe, the symbol that bore up until 1970 and then become desire and moved to technical museums.

Other Dubrovnik transport devices are legendary boats, larger or smaller ones, as well as motorboats, usually smaller ones, which transport tourists to nearby mainland places or to the islands. Most effectively the boats take tourists to a small town of Cavtat. The same could be said of the connection that for decades have mainland and small island of Lokrum, the place which is not recommended, by a legend, to spend a night in.
Ship connections with the islands of Elafit Archipelago could be better. The easiest point to reach those islands, Kolocep, Lopud and Sipan, is from Gruz. In the past, beautiful white fleet, as they were called, navigated there. The most famous among the ships was Perast, which was damaged during the war. In their glorious days these ships were starting from Gruz around midday and they stopped not only on the islands but also at mainland towns such as Zaton, Trsteno and , for some time even at Ston. Development of motorways and the building up bridge over Rijeka dubrovacka made those spectacular and irreplaceable tourist zig-zag lines useless. Well, connection with Kolocep, Lopud and Sipan is still there, similar but more practical one; as for the more distanced isle of Mljet, there is a fast ship that communicates with it and it's west port of Polace on a daily basis. Lastovo, in the past the furthest island under Dubrovnik Republic, is reached today by ships only from Split via Vela Luka on Korcula making that island a part of Dubrovnik's emotional geography only symbolically and by historical nostalgia.

Joomla Templates and Joomla Extensions by JoomlaVision.Com