Pile Gate

The Pile Gate is the main way into Dubrovnik's Old Town from the west, and the point where most visitors first step onto the Stradun. It is not really one gate but a complex of two, built almost eighty years apart, joined by a stone bridge and backed by one of the strongest fortresses on the city walls. Nearly everything about it was designed for defence, and almost all of it still stands.

Two Gates, a Bridge and a Nightly Ceremony

The inner gate dates from 1460 and is a Gothic structure tied directly into the city walls. The outer gate, added in 1537, is a Renaissance work forming a semicircular bastion in front of it, so anyone approaching had to pass through both in sequence along a dog-leg route overlooked from above. Between them runs the stone bridge, designed by the Ragusan architect Paskoje Miličević in 1471, which carried traffic over the moat on two Gothic arches.

Beyond the stone bridge was a wooden drawbridge. During the centuries when Dubrovnik governed itself as the Republic of Ragusa, it was raised every evening in a formal ceremony and the keys to the city handed over to the rector, then returned the following morning. The drawbridge is long gone, but the mechanical counterweights that once hauled it up are still visible on either side of the gate, and the fixings are easy to pick out if you look up while walking through.

The Saints Above the Arches

Both gates carry a statue of St Blaise, Dubrovnik's patron saint, whose image appears on fortifications, coins and public buildings all over the city. The figure set in the niche above the outer gate's Renaissance arch is the older of the two, showing the saint holding a model of the city in his hand, which is the standard way he is depicted in Ragusan art. The statue on the inner gate is a modern addition by Ivan Meštrović, who lived from 1883 to 1962 and was the most prominent Croatian sculptor of the twentieth century.

Bokar, Lovrijenac and the Western Approach

Pile was the most exposed point in Dubrovnik's defences and the city compensated heavily. Directly to the south stands the Bokar fortress, a two-storey casemate work built between 1461 and 1463 to a design by the Florentine architect Michelozzo and positioned specifically to cover the gate and the bridge with cannon fire. Across the small bay rises Fort Lovrijenac, perched on a rock 37 metres above the sea, with walls up to twelve metres thick on the sides facing outwards and much thinner ones facing the city, so that the fort could be reduced from within if it ever fell into enemy hands.

The walls themselves run roughly 1,940 metres around the Old Town, reach about 25 metres at their highest and are reinforced by three circular and fourteen quadrangular towers. They came through the catastrophic 1667 earthquake largely intact even as the city behind them collapsed, and Dubrovnik's Old Town was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1979. During the siege of 1991 and 1992, 563 of the Old Town's 824 buildings were hit by projectiles; the repairs are now almost invisible, though roof tiles of slightly different shades still give some of them away.

Through the Gate: Stradun and the Onofrio Fountain

Walk through and a short flight of steps drops you onto the Stradun, the limestone-paved street that runs 300 metres from Pile to the Ploče Gate at the far end. It was not always a street: originally a marshy sea channel separating the island settlement of Laus from Dubrava on the mainland, it was filled in during the twelfth century and the two communities merged. Its uniform appearance dates from the rebuilding after 1667, when the Republic legislated a standard house design for the whole city, with shops below and living quarters above.

Immediately to the right is the Onofrio Fountain, a sixteen-sided drum built between 1438 and 1440 by the Neapolitan engineer Onofrio della Cava as the public outlet of a new aqueduct running some twelve kilometres from the Šumet spring. Water still runs from its carved mask spouts, and the same spring still supplies the city.

Visiting Pile Today

Pile is the busiest entrance to the Old Town and the main terminus for city buses and taxis, so it is at its worst in the middle of a summer day, particularly when several cruise ships are in port. Early morning and evening are far calmer. The gate and the Stradun are step-free by way of a ramp, which makes this the practical entrance for wheelchairs and pushchairs, since the eastern approach at Ploče involves stairs. The gate and the walls around it also show up on screen, standing in for the exterior of King's Landing in Game of Thrones, which brings a steady stream of fans through every summer. It is a fitting first stop before chartering a gulet from Dubrovnik and seeing the same fortifications from the water.