Revelin Fortress

Fort Revelin stands just outside Dubrovnik's Old Town, on the eastern side near the Ploče Gate. The name comes from "rivelino" — a term in military architecture for an outwork built opposite a gate to give it extra protection — and that is exactly the job it was built to do. The first version of the fort went up around 1462, right after the fall of Constantinople and the Ottoman advance into Bosnia had made Dubrovnik's rulers nervous about their eastern approach.

The fortress got its current, much sturdier shape later, in response to a different threat. In 1538, worried about a possible Venetian attack during the war of the First Holy League, the Senate hired Antonio Ferramolino, an Italian military engineer who had worked for the Spanish admiral Andrea Doria. Ferramolino redesigned Revelin as an irregular quadrilateral with a sharp projecting corner facing north, a moat on three sides, and a southern wall that drops straight into the sea. The Senate considered the project urgent enough to halt every other construction project in the city until it was finished — the rebuild took eleven years.

That over-engineering paid off: Revelin came through the devastating earthquake of 1667 essentially unscathed, and afterward it briefly became the administrative heart of the republic, holding council sessions and storing the state's treasures while the rest of the city rebuilt.

These days the fortress leads a double life. Its terrace — at over 800 square metres, the largest open space of its kind in the Old Town — is one of the main venues of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival each summer. After dark, the same stone walls house Culture Club Revelin, a nightclub with room for more than 2,000 people that has become one of the biggest names on Croatia's nightlife scene.

History and nightlife aside, the fort's terrace also gives one of the better views over the Old Town's walls and the harbour — reason enough to add it to the list before or after chartering a gulet from Dubrovnik.