A love letter to Dubrovnik’s winter

I was drinking coffee with friends on a crisp December Saturday, occasionally casting a concerned eye towards their young son who was playing nearby. He was kicking a football around with schoolmates on the Stradun, the ancient thoroughfare of polished stone that runs through the heart of Dubrovnik’s Old Town. It is, after all, the perfect place to play: the side-alleys branching off the street are the ideal width to serve as makeshift goals.

It was the kind of scene that would have been impossible during the tourist season, when the Stradun is so thick with tourists that it is pretty difficult to dash from one side to the other, never mind kick a ball across it.

It is in winter that local people emerge to retake control of their city, after a long summer in which they retreat from an Old Town thick with visiting bodies. It is also in winter that an off-season visitor will find it much easier to mingle with the natural rhythms of local life. Cafés considered tourist territory in summer revert to their local clientele and serve as backdrop to a social life that has been kept in abeyance during the preceding months. This is especially true on Saturday mornings, the time of the week when Croats traditionally meet up for a cup of the dark stuff, take time to survey the newspapers, and indulge in an extended pre-lunch gossip. A classic coffee-sipping venue such as Gradska Kavana (literally ‘Town Café’), with its outdoor terrace overlooking the central Luža Square, comes into its own in winter, when it renews its age-old function as the city’s main meeting point and information exchange.

And for those of us who come from Europe’s northern latitudes, the Adriatic winter doesn’t even seem like a real winter. Average temperatures rarely fall below 10°C. Most of the vegetation is evergreen; the palm trees retain their colour. People continue to conduct their social life out of doors, habitually angling their faces towards the sun like basking cats.

Further evidence of the Old Town’s seasonal change of personality can be found on Bunićeva Poljana, the sheltered, palazzo-lined piazza that hides behind Dubrovnik’s Cathedral. Surrounded by cafés and covered almost entirely with their tables, the square is a magnet for sightseeing tourists in summer. In the off-season, it is the buzzing hangout of local teenagers eager to exchange the latest banter in between shifts at the nearby high school. The staff who work the tables are likely to be locals, too, and will stop to chat to customers (and may even remember your regular order if you call in more than once).

If winter restores something of the Old Town’s dignity as the main stage on which local life is enacted, it also makes the city easier for a foreigner to read. When I first started visiting Dubrovnik out of season I almost expected it be a disappointment, as if the grandeur of one of the Mediterranean’s greatest city-states was not going to have the same impact without the crowds and colours of high summer. In fact, visiting the city in winter brought its history much closer.

It took me time, space and a measure of solitude to fully take in the riot of Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture that manages to squeeze itself between the Old Town’s famously sturdy walls. What at first sight seemed to be a fairly compact city, the kind of place you can walk across in five minutes flat, turned out to be much more complicated. The Old Town was like an open-air version of Doctor Who’s Tardis, a warren of stone burrows that seemed to grow more extensive the further away from the main street you went. This was especially true on the south side of the historic city, with its mediaeval tenements pressed up against the sea-facing walls. It took hours, if not days, of patient wandering to unlock all its secrets. There was always another fascinating façade at the end of another alleyway, round another corner. I found that exploring all this could be extraordinarily tiring in summer, with exhaustion setting in long before I had fully satisfied the curiosity with which I had set out.

The same might be said about the walk atop the city walls, the one thing that almost every visitor to Dubrovnik regards as a must-do. Walking the parapet can get pretty fraught in summer, with progress reduced to a slow shuffle by the sheer numbers who make their way up here. Strolling the battlements in the off-season allowed me the time and space necessary to feast slowly on Dubrovnik’s urban panorama and try and work out what its splendour was all about.

It also provided me with enough personal space to open up my umbrella when the rain started – something that occurs on an average of 14 days each month from December through to February. Precipitation did however bring its own share of poetry, with the Old Town’s paving stones taking on a beckoning glisten. Afterwards, borne by the breeze, the scent of wild thyme, sage and fennel drifted into the city from the nearby hillsides. And it is with this distinct aroma lingering in my nostrils that I realised that coming to Dubrovnik in winter was the best decision I ever made.