Fort Lovrijenac

Dubrovnik has more than its share of walls, but the one visitors photograph most is not part of the circuit at all. Fort Lovrijenac stands apart from the Old Town, on its own rock across a small bay, and the gap between the two is exactly what gives the view its drama. That gap is also the reason the fort exists: a free-standing rock outside the walls was precisely the sort of place an enemy would want to occupy, so the Republic of Ragusa made certain it got there first.

A Fortress Built to Keep Venice Out

Fort Lovrijenac stands on a rock 37 meters above the sea, just west of Dubrovnik's Old Town walls and separate from them, which is part of why it looks so dramatic from a distance. Locals call it the "Gibraltar of Dubrovnik."

According to the old Chronicles of Ragusa, the fort went up in just three months after word got out that Venice wanted to build its own fortress on the same spot. Whether that timeline is literally true or not, the first official record of a fort commander here dates to 1301. Either way, the message was the same: Dubrovnik would defend its independence itself rather than let Venice do it.

Some chroniclers push the origins back further still, to 1018 or 1038, and the building standing today is the product of continual rebuilding across the centuries rather than any single burst of work. The council elected the fort's commander, which is the very act first recorded in 1301, and kept the appointment short and closely supervised, a precaution that says a good deal about how a small merchant republic thought about the risk posed by its own officers.

Triangular by Design

The fort is triangular, and its walls aren't uniform by accident. On the seaward and landward sides they run up to 12 meters thick to withstand a siege; the wall facing the city is barely a meter thick, by some accounts as little as 60 centimetres, thin enough that if a fort commander ever turned against the Republic, the city could retake it quickly. Over the entrance, an inscription still reads Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro, "freedom is not sold for all the gold in the world."

Inside, the space is arranged over three terraces set on the parapets, each a level of defence and, incidentally, each a better viewpoint than the one below. Two drawbridges control the approach, and beyond them the entrance opens onto a courtyard ringed by high arches. The climb from the seafront is a long one, somewhere between 175 and 200 uneven stone steps before you reach the gate, which keeps the fort noticeably quieter than the city walls even in August.

Cannons, a Chapel and the Great Earthquake

Ten cannons were mounted on the fort's upper level. The largest of them, nicknamed Gušter, "the Lizard," was cast by the Dubrovnik bell-founder Ivan Rabljanin in 1537, elaborately decorated, and by the surviving accounts never fired in anger. That is a fair summary of the fort's entire military career: it was built, armed and maintained as a deterrent, and it worked largely by being visibly there. The Republic of Ragusa survived for centuries on the same principle, buying peace with diplomacy and tribute and keeping its fortifications impressive enough that no one wanted to test them.

The fort takes its name from Saint Lawrence, Sveti Lovrijenac in Croatian, and a small chapel dedicated to him sits inside the walls; a church to the same saint is thought to have stood on the rock before the fortress did. Its worst day came not from an enemy but from the ground: the catastrophic earthquake of 1667, which levelled much of Dubrovnik and killed thousands, damaged Lovrijenac badly enough that repairs dragged on to the end of the seventeenth century.

Hamlet on the Terrace

Today the fort's terrace doubles as one of Europe's more atmospheric open-air stages, hosting Hamlet during the Dubrovnik Summer Festival each year. The festival was founded in 1950, and the director Marko Fotez staged Hamlet inside the fort as early as 1952. The pairing of the play with the fortress proved so natural that it became one of the festival's signatures, revived again and again over the decades that followed, with the sea as a backdrop and the walls doing the work a set designer would otherwise have to invent. Other productions have followed, including A Midsummer Night's Dream in 2017 and 2018, but Hamlet on the ramparts remains the image the festival is known by.

The Red Keep, and Visiting Today

It's also instantly recognizable to Game of Thrones fans as the Red Keep of King's Landing, where Joffrey's name-day tournament and the Battle of Blackwater were filmed. The fort carried the role across the show's early seasons, its courtyard and terraces standing in for the royal fortress, and the name-day tournament opens the second season's first episode. The historical drama Knightfall filmed its siege of Acre sequences here in June 2017, and the fort has also been used for concerts, ceremonies and private events.

The fortress is owned by the City of Dubrovnik and open to the public, and the practical detail worth knowing is that a City Walls ticket also covers entry to Lovrijenac for a few days afterwards, so the two are best treated as one visit rather than two. The stairs rule out wheelchairs and pushchairs, and there is very little shade at the top, so morning light suits the climb and late afternoon suits the terraces. Seeing it from the water gives a completely different sense of scale than the postcard shots, one more reason many visitors end up exploring the coast by boat from Dubrovnik.