Croatia · Old Town
Dubrovnik
A self-guided walking tour of the Dubrovnik Old Town, every street in one day.
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Dubrovnik is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
At a glance
Plan your walk.
- Distance
- 10.2 km
- Time
- about 3 hours
- Streets
- 82
- Steps
- 50 streets with steps
- Start point
- Knežev dvor
- Phone needed while walking
- no
- Works offline
- yes
- Expires
- never
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Knežev dvor 1,500 points
This one hands its ground floor to the lane. The arcade is open and you walk straight through it. Stop underneath and look up: no two of the capitals over your head are the same.
Crkva sv. Blagovještenja 500 points
On Od Puča, one lane south of the main run. The front is modest enough that you can walk the street twice and not notice it. Slow down at the door. What is behind it does not match what is in front of it.
Crkva sv. Ignacija 500 points
The quietest corner of the town, up at the top of the south side, and the last thing most people reach. You come up out of breath, and then the whole day you have walked is lying under you. Save this bite for later.
Sv. Franjo 500 points
It sits at the far west end of the main street, and almost everybody walks past its long flank on the way in without turning. Turn. The way in is a narrow door on the side, and the quiet behind it is worth the detour.
Bokar 250 points
It sits out over the water at the western point, on its own piece of rock, with sea under three sides of it. Across the little bay, Lovrijenac looks back from its cliff. The two of them have been doing that for a very long time and neither has blinked.
Minčeta 250 points
The high point of the entire ring, up in the north west corner. From here everything else in the town is under you, and on the far side there is nothing but sea. It is a proper climb. I have never once regretted a climb.
Revelin 250 points
You have to leave the ring for this one: over the bridge at the east end and out. Which is exactly why it is quiet up there. The terrace looks back at the town, and nothing else on this route does that.
Sv. Ivan 250 points
Low, thick and standing in the water at the head of the quay. There is an aquarium in the base of it now and a maritime museum upstairs. A building that spent centuries looking at the sea and keeps a little of it in tanks.
Eating
Actual food.
Dubrovnik is a rock with walls round it, and a rock grows nothing. So the Republic ate from what it owned. In 1333 it rented an oyster bay near Ston from a Bosnian ban, and later made the bay its own. Quince and grape sweets came in from Konavle, and bitter oranges out of the gardens at Gruž. Every dish on this list arrived through a gate. I was lying in the road and watched it come in.
Meat and fish
Malostonska kamenica
Oysters from the bay at Mali Ston, up the coast, eaten as they are with a little lemon. The Republic rented a bay there in 1333 and was farming oysters in it by the sixteenth century. The name is protected across the EU, and the official specification says the meat melts in the mouth. It is rare that I agree with a legal document this completely.
Only oysters from Mali Ston Bay may carry that name. If the menu just says oysters, ask where they came from.
Sources: Ministarstvo poljoprivrede, Turistička zajednica Dubrovačko-neretvanske županije
Zelena menestra
Cabbage, kale and potatoes, cooked with several kinds of dried meat: smoked pork, pancetta, homemade sausage, sometimes dried mutton. It was a favourite of the Dubrovnik nobility, and every village still makes it its own way. A winter pot, and above all a Christmas one. Named after the greens, built on the pork. I admire the modesty.
A winter dish. In summer, ask before you count on it.
Sources: Turistička zajednica Dubrovačko-neretvanske županije, Morski HR, Glas Grada
Šporki makaruli
Pasta under a slow beef sauce, cooked for the feast of St Blaise, the town's patron, on 3 February. Šporki means dirty. The meat ran out before the pasta did, and whoever came last got noodles with only a smear of sauce on them. Nobody asks to have a dish named after their plate. It happened anyway.
It belongs to early February. The rest of the year, ask whether the kitchen makes it.
Sources: Turistička zajednica Dubrovačko-neretvanske županije, Morski HR, Glas Grada
Vegetarian
Two, because the old savoury table here is fish and dried meat, and its meatless half is almost all sweet. The three sweets that need no egg or butter are on the vegan list. These two need both, and they are not shy about it.
Rozata
Eggs, milk, sugar and lemon zest, set slowly in a water bath inside a mould lined with caramel. Whenever Dubrovnik has a feast it is on the table, and many restaurants in town carry it the rest of the year. The caramel does all the talking. The custard just sits there looking calm, and I respect that.
Sources: Turistička zajednica Dubrovačko-neretvanske županije, DubrovnikNet, Index.hr
Stonski makaruli
A cake with pasta inside it. Short macaroni, laid in pastry with ground almonds, walnuts, chocolate, cinnamon and lemon, bound with butter and eggs and baked. It comes from Ston, where the oysters live, and it was holiday baking. Somebody put noodles in a cake on purpose, and I am on their side.
Sources: Turistička zajednica Dubrovačko-neretvanske županije, Story.hr, Lijepa naša
Vegan
Arancini
Orange peel, boiled and drained again and again until the bitterness gives up, then cooked in its own weight of sugar and rolled in more. Lemon and grapefruit peel get the same treatment. In Dubrovnik they belong to the winter feasts, from Christmas through St Blaise. Everywhere else this part of the orange goes in the bin. Here it is the dessert.
Sources: Turistička zajednica Dubrovačko-neretvanske županije, Deša Dubrovnik, DuList
Kontonjata
Quince, cooked down into a sweet, and in the local dialect the fruit itself is a mrkatunja. It was offered through the winter months, and at Christmas it goes out beside mantala and the dried fruit. Konavle, just south of town, is where it is most at home. I have a soft spot for a fruit with a nickname.
Sources: Turistička zajednica Dubrovačko-neretvanske županije, Deša Dubrovnik, DuList
Mantala
Grape juice boiled down thick, with walnuts stirred in and then some disagreement: coarse wheat and almonds in one account, carob in another. It is kept somewhere dry until Christmas. Hardly anybody makes it now, which is exactly why Dubrovnik holds a competition for it. A sweet that waits for months is my kind of sweet.
Rarely made and rarely sold. Outside December, do not expect to find it.
Sources: Turistička zajednica Dubrovačko-neretvanske županije, Deša Dubrovnik, DuList
Late breakfast
Buffet Škola come for the one thing: the bread with homemade pršut
Antuninska 1
A small buffet a step off Stradun, and the bread is the point. It is baked here every day and filled with homemade pršut, cheese kept in oil, or both, at snack bar prices. There are salted sardines if you want the sea in it as well. It was shut for years and reopened in 1996, which from where I lie is a short nap.
Sources: Falstaff Restaurant Guide Croatia 2026, In Your Pocket
Afternoon coffee
Cogito Coffee Old Town come for the one thing: the Cogito coffee
Stajeva 5
A tiny specialty coffee bar on Stajeva, a side lane inside the walls, pouring beans roasted by Cogito in Zagreb. There are seats outside on the cobbles, and there is plant milk. It opened because its founders thought the coffee on this coast was not keeping up with the food. I sat on those cobbles for centuries without a cup, so I take their side.
There is a second Cogito outside the walls in Ploče. This one is on Stajeva, inside them. The listed hours disagree, so go in the morning.
Sources: European Coffee Trip, In Your Pocket, Sprudge, Anders Husa & Kaitlin Orr
Dinner
Kamenice come for the one thing: the Mali Ston oysters
Gundulićeva poljana 8
Come for the Mali Ston oysters from the food list, on crushed ice with a slice of lemon. The rest is a short board of about fifteen plain things: black risotto, small fried fish, mussels, squid. The menu has not moved in decades, the plates are big, and the bill is low for a table on the market square. I like a kitchen that stopped changing once it got it right.
In summer it is nearly always full and people wait. Come early or come twice.
Sources: Gault&Millau Croatia, In Your Pocket, Bengeri
Sesame where locals go
Dante Alighieria 2
Five minutes out past the Pile gate, in a stone house about two hundred years old, with wood panelling inside and a garden you would never guess from the road. They bake their own bread every day and make the pasta fresh, and the house stays open through the winter. A city guide written for Croatian visitors calls it a hidden gem. A garden behind a wall is my favourite kind of hiding.
- Mon09:00–24:00
- Tue09:00–24:00
- Wed09:00–24:00
- Thu09:00–24:00
- Fri09:00–24:00
- Sat09:00–24:00
- Sun09:00–24:00
The menu reaches for truffles and lobster. If you are watching the bill, the fresh pasta is the way in.
Sources: Falstaff Restaurant Guide Croatia 2026, In Your Pocket, Bengeri
Checked 13 September 2026.
Name origin
Why it is called Dubrovnik.
Two names, one town. Ragusa is the medieval Latin one, and Italian still uses it. Dubrovnik is the Slavic one, and it comes out of the woods: dubrava, a wood of oaks. So a city built entirely of quarried stone is named after trees. There is not one left inside the walls. I counted.
Sources: jezik.hr; hjp.znanje.hr; www.enciklopedija.hr
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
The Old Town is a rock, and behind the rock there was water. Look at the main street: dead straight, dead flat, and the only thing here that is either. It is flat because it used to be sea. The shallow strip between the rock and the mainland was filled in, and the filling is the street you are standing on. Everything else climbs, up towards Srđ. That is why so much of this level is steps.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr; zod.hr
Why then
When the first stone went down.
The story everybody tells goes like this: in the seventh century people came up the coast from Epidaurum, and the town starts with them. The ground disagrees. At what is now the town harbour the oldest traces of habitation are Hellenistic, and Roman gravestones and Hellenistic, Illyrian, Roman and Byzantine coins have all come up out of this ground. A founding date is really a moving-in date. Somebody was always here first. Usually me.
Sources: zod.hr; www.enciklopedija.hr
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 500–1100
Byzantium, from a very long way off. For something like six centuries the town grew under Byzantine protection, on a Romance and Slavic footing, which in practice meant an emperor far away and a free hand close up. The free hand went into treaties, one after another: Molfetta, Pisa, Ravenna, Ancona, Bosnia. That is an arrangement I could live with.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr
- 1205–1358
Venice. From 1205 the town recognised Venetian overlordship, and Venice made use of it: it picked the rector and the archbishop, installed both, and tried to run the trade and the shipping as well. So the man living in the palace on your route was chosen somewhere else. It ended in 1358, when the peace of Zadar pushed Venice off this entire coast.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr; zod.hr
- 1358–1808
Itself, formally under the crown of Croatia and Hungary. The treaty of Višegrad of 27 May 1358 put the town under that king and it kept everything else: territory reaching fifty kilometres north and south, its own coinage, seal, flag, courts, laws and embassies. It called itself Respublica Ragusina. It founded more than twenty consulates in the fifteenth century and had more than eighty consuls abroad by the eighteenth. All of it decided inside a walled town you can cross in ten minutes.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr; zod.hr
- 1808–1918
France, then Austria. In 1808 Marshal Marmont dissolved the republic and attached the town to the Illyrian Provinces. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815 the area went to the Habsburg Monarchy, which liked the position enough to keep the place on the books as a fortified town until 1886, and to go on extending the system. So these walls were still on duty a decade after somebody invented the telephone.
Sources: zod.hr; www.enciklopedija.hr
- 1918–
Yugoslavia, then Croatia. The twentieth century put the town inside Yugoslavia, since 1991 it has been in the Republic of Croatia, and today it is the administrative seat of its county. In 1979 the Old Town was put forward for the UNESCO world heritage list. That is the first time in this whole long queue of owners that somebody wrote down that the lanes themselves were the point.
Sources: zod.hr
The emblem
What the shield means.
The real arms are a shield shaped like an upside down pear, with eight bars across it, red and silver in turn, the first red and the last silver. Eight bars is about six more than a glyph this size can carry. From any distance it would be a smudge. So the icon is a round tower off the city wall instead. Sixteen of them sit in the ring you are walking, and in places the wall behind them stands twenty five metres out of the rock. That one reads from across a room.
Sources: www.dubrovnik.hr; citywallsdubrovnik.hr
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
These lanes are exactly as wide as somebody decided they should be. The city statute of 1272 set precise rules for planned development: prescribed street widths, where housing and public space could go, stone instead of timber, paved lanes and squares, and houses made to fit regular blocks. After the great fire of 1296 a further provision governed building across more than two thirds of the town. You are walking around inside a legal document.
Sources: zod.hr
A rock by the sea has no fresh water of its own. So the town went and fetched some. Between 1436 and 1437 a conduit brought water in from the springs at Šumet, almost twelve kilometres off, and the whole job took sixteen months. Most of it lies idle now, but its line still shows in the shape of the districts outside the walls.
Sources: zod.hr
One thousand nine hundred and forty metres of stone, once around. That is the edge of this level, and you can see it from nearly every lane inside it. The ring took its present shape in the thirteenth century, picked up a renaissance skin in front of it in the fifteenth, and its fortresses were finished in the seventeenth. Nothing was added after that, because there was nowhere left to put it.
Sources: zod.hr
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- Od
- Of, or from. The street is named for what stands on it or where it takes you: Od Puča for the wells, Od Rupa for the grain pits, and then Od Domina, Od Kaštela, Od Sigurate, Od Margarite, Od Sorte and Od Pustijerne. Eight signposts pretending to be street names.
- Za
- Behind. Za Rokom runs behind St Roch, Za Karmenom behind the Carmelite house, Za Rupama behind the pits. A town small enough that behind is address enough.
- Ispod
- Below, and it brings its whole family: Ispod Minčete, Ispod Mira, Iza Grada, Između Polača, Pred Dvorom, Uz Jezuite, Na Andriji. These are not names, they are directions. And the mir in Ispod Mira is a wall, not peace.
- poljana
- An open square, though the word starts out meaning a field. Bunićeva poljana, Gundulićeva poljana, Poljana Marina Držića, Poljana Ruđera Boškovića. The flat spots in a town that otherwise goes upstairs.
- -eva
- The ending just means his. Boškovićeva, Palmotićeva, Zlatarićeva, Đorđićeva, Gundulićeva: so-and-so's street, with the word for street usually dropped altogether. More than twenty lanes here are a surname and nothing else.
- Uska
- Narrow. There is an Uska and an Uska ulica, and both are telling the truth. There is also a Široka, which means broad, and it is not. All of them suit me fine.
- Zlatarska
- A trade instead of a person, and there are only a few: Zlatarska from the goldsmiths, Kovačka from the smiths, Zeljarica from the greens. Three lanes that say what was sold on them. One of those sounds like lunch.
The size of it
Walk it in a day: Dubrovnik in numbers.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 82streets
- 561dots
- 8.2km of street
- 10.2km on foot
- 3hours at a stroll
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.