“Disgusting.”
That’s how a local driver described the roads in 2017. Back then, it regularly took three hours to drive the 21km to the airport. The driver spent his days anxiously sitting in traffic jams, unhappy guests sweating in the back seat as their dinner reservations, boat sailings and even flight times came and went.
Ask locals, drivers, tour guides and even the mayor what Dubrovnik’s biggest problem is today, and they all say it’s still the high-season traffic that is making their lives a misery.
Each day in the summer 9,000 cabbies descend on Dubrovnik, a staggering 28 times increase in a decade. One Bosnian in the ranks told the Mirror how he commutes four hours a day to join the scrum, earning £10,000 across the season. Hard work but a good pay packet, given the Bosnian minimum wage is £266 a month.
It’s a big problem, and one of the final overtourism issues mayor of seven years Mato Franković is hoping to tackle before he fights for his seat in two months time. “Taxis are a huge problem, the biggest problem,” the member of the Conservative Croatian Democratic Union party tells me from a palatial room in the mayor’s palace.
It bean in 2017 with the national liberalisation of taxi laws. Since then, the beautiful city has become overwhelmed by cabbies hoping to pick up a wealthy American or two who now fly into the city on the country’s only direct flight from the US. Taxi drivers used to have to pass a test on the city’s history to drive here, but now their primary qualification is whether they’re willing to fight it out in the miles-long queues that choke up the city centre come the summer.
Mayor Franković helped pass federal legislation restricting taxi licenses in the UNESCO Old Town to 700. The camera system set up to police it will be switched on later this year—a delay from the scheduled March 1 after a boulder fell from the mountain above the Old Town, killing a van driver and triggering some urgent cliff stabilisation works.
If the new scheme works, then rumours that the mayor is destined for a more senior role leading Dubrovnik-Neretva County may turn out to be true. “I hate his party, but he’s okay,” a young local tells me.
Such grudging respect has been won by a string of policies designed to save the 1,400 year old Old Town from becoming even more of an unbearable sweaty mess than it was in the summer of 2017, when CNN condemned it as one of 12 global destinations to avoid.
Cruise ship numbers have been cut, and their arrivals have been staggered. Now, passengers must stay for eight hours, meaning the 600,000 who turned up last year spend more despite being 400,000 fewer than seven years ago.
Street vendor numbers in the Old Town are down 70%, while coach arrivals have been halved. Now a camera system counts visitors in and out of the Old Town. The “maximum comfortable limit” (according to a University of Dubrovnik study) of 11,297 a day is 800 higher than last year’s busiest day.
Dubrovnik has had to take these measures for numerous reasons. As flight numbers and hunger for travel grow, overtourism has become a bigger problem in destinations across the globe. For Dubrovnik, that has coincided with its rise to small and big screen stardom.
As all Game of Thrones (GOT) fans know, it was the location for King’s Landing.
“60% of the tours are GOT tours now. People here know you can charge twice as much for a Walk of Shame mojito than a normal one,” Maroje Žanetić, a destination fixer, tells me as we visit some of the city’s most recognisable places. The list stretches into the hundreds, but notable titles include Succession, Robin Hood, Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi and Captain America.
He and fellow fixers Tomislav Tepšić and Deanom Tosovicem are among the few thousand locals who remain living in the Old Town, and who use their local connections to suggest spots to film and TV studios. Their arrival has brought cash and jobs, with the trio hiring dozens of blockers to close down the streets, paying shopkeepers for the inconvenience, and even spending £6,000 for temporary Wi-Fi coverage across the Old Town, so the Star Wars crew could get onto Instagram.
Even people as far away as Hungary got a slice of the pie when sets from Star Wars were sent there to be burned, the fixers claim. Disney has not responded to a request for comment on this claim. As we walk through the town, the fixers stop every 30 seconds to say ‘hi’ to another neighbour, slowing our pace slightly as we head towards Dubrovnik’s most famous spot – the Walk of Shame steps.
In GOT, Cersei Lannister is forced to walk naked down the steps as a form of public humiliation. Dozens of local extras were hired to hurl abuse at her, painting the final cut blue with unspeakably rude Croatian slurs that slipped past the editors.
Today, the staircase is out of bounds ahead of the summer season. A team of stonemasons are fixing the blast holes on the steps that have now deteriorated to a dangerous extent. Among them is an Old Towner whose parent was killed here in the 90s, when Serbian bombs fell onto the city.
Such horrors also lie behind Dubrovnik’s remarkably quick rise as a tourist destination.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when Croatia was at war with the Serbian-controlled Yugoslavia, its warlord leader Slobodan Milošević ordered bombs to rain down on the Old Town from the mountain above, the sky, and the sea.
Local tour guide Lidija Begić lived in the heart of the Old Town back then. She was among those who huddled in the centuries-old, metres thick walls without electricity or water for three months as if they were the victims of a Medieval siege. Modern bombs ripped through the stonework, claiming 50 lives on a single day.
Like everyone else I met, Lidija doesn’t want to dwell on the war, but instead focus on the culture of hospitality that existed before, and now after. “It might seem like a paradox given the thickness of the walls, but the city was open to everyone for hundreds of years,” she says as we look down at the city from Lovrjenac Fort.
During those centuries, visitors were welcomed in, so long as they brought with them one stone to be added to the city’s defenses. After the war ended, stones were swapped for development capital as budget airlines and hotel chains realised how desirable and beautiful Dubrovnik was.
Following periods of near famine and death, the city’s fortunes turned around at a remarkable rate. And then the party continued for a little bit too long. Mayor Franković came into office after two decades of that growth with a mandate to stop its excesses.
Mark Thomas, a Brit who moved to Croatia in the 90s and now runs the local paper the Dubrovnik Times, tells me over a coffee: “Tourism was something that happened to us. We used to be passive, and infrastructure was breaking down.” Today, things are much better, he says. The buses are “excellent” and the numbers in the Old Town manageable. That said, it is a no-go-zone for him and his Croatian wife in the high season.
“We don’t come into town in August,” he admits, also refusing to share any ‘hidden gems’ for fear “the Instagrammers will ruin them”.
Mark, like everyone I met in Dubrovnik, has a deep enthusiasm for the city, and feels protective of it. The negative headlines hurt, including those claiming that “Dubrovnik is dying”, as Mayor Franković remembers ruefully.
“I fell in love with the city and I want other people to fall in love with it as well,” Mark explains, before jumping into fluent Croatian as a friend passes by.
In terms of what happens next, there are still some challenges to address.
Croatia’s population has fallen from 4.5 million to 3.8 since 2000, leaving shortages in many industries. Dubrovnik may be inundated with cab drivers, but it’s crying out for hospitality workers. Another set of figures doesn’t add up. There are far too many Airbnbs, according to the mayor at least.
“We have 27,000 overnights a day in July, and 45,000 beds. There is too much supply. Locals are moving further out. The city will become a museum if its citizens are moving out, or a big hotel if all the tourists come in,” he says, highlighting a new law allowing residents across Croatia to kick Airbnbs out, if 60% of a given block agree to do so.
Miro Drašković, director of the city’s tourist board, readily admits these challenges, but says much has been done, and that the city’s folk are not the type to get the water pistols out as others have elsewhere.
“The French and Spanish are protesting, but we realise we rely on tourism,” he explains. If the short-lived nature of supermarket protests in response to years of rising food prices in February is anything to go by, he’s right about the relaxed Croations’ disinclination to take to the streets.
The mayor, however, has spent years battling with local businesses, cruise companies, hotel firms and cab ranks. It will become clear in May, when Dubrovnik goes to the polls, whether or not the locals want him to continue that fight, or go in another direction.
Mayor Franković clearly believes that he must if the ‘Pearl of the Adriatic’ is to continue shining. “The interests of the city are much higher than the interests of the individuals. We need to think about our future.”
