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Few cities carry their mythology as visibly as Dubrovnik. The limestone walls that encircle the Old Town have stood since the medieval period, and walking their full circuit, roughly two kilometres of ramparts above the Adriatic, remains one of the most arresting things a visitor can do anywhere on the Croatian coast. The city was once the capital of the Republic of Ragusa, a maritime trading state that rivalled Venice in its diplomatic cunning and commercial reach, and that independent spirit still feels present in the architecture: the Rector's Palace, the Franciscan monastery with its fourteenth-century pharmacy, the long pedestrian artery of the Stradun laid in pale polished stone. Dubrovnik-Neretva county places the city at the southernmost tip of Croatia, separated from the rest of the country by a sliver of Bosnian coastline at Neum, which only reinforces the sense that this is a place slightly apart from everywhere else.

The Old Town is the obvious gravitational centre for a first visit, and rightly so, but the surrounding area rewards those who look outward. The Elaphite Islands lie just offshore, a scattered archipelago of pine-covered land and quiet coves that the city's medieval nobility once used as a retreat. Cruises out to the Elaphites, typically including lunch and open bar aboard, give a sense of the Adriatic as Ragusa's merchants would have understood it: a highway rather than a backdrop. Further afield, the day trip to Kotor and Perast in Montenegro crosses a border and drops into the Bay of Kotor, a drowned river canyon that the Adriatic has claimed over millennia, with Venetian-era towns arranged along its inner shore.