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A crowd of tourists gather around the Onofrio fountain at the entrance of the fortress in the Old Town, Dubrovnik. The city is being overrun by tourists. Photo: Alamy

Mass tourism threatens Croatia’s Game of Thrones city Dubrovnik, and it’s getting worse

The Unesco World Heritage site on the Adriatic is under threat from hordes of cruise ship tourists who crowd its narrow streets looking for landmarks from the hit TV series

Marc van Bloemen has lived in the old town of Dubrovnik, the Croatian citadel widely praised as the jewel of the Adriatic, for decades, since he was a child. He says it used to be a privilege. Now it’s a nightmare.

Crowds of tourists clog the entrances to the ancient walled city, a Unesco World Heritage Site, as huge cruise ships unload thousands more daily. People bump into each other on the famous limestone-paved Stradun, the pedestrian street lined with medieval churches and palaces, as fans of the popular TV series Game of Thrones search for the locations where it was filmed.

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Dubrovnik is a prime example of the effects of mass tourism, a global phenomenon in which the increase in people travelling means stand-out sites – particularly small ones – get overwhelmed by crowds. As the number of visitors keeps rising, local authorities are looking for ways to keep the throngs from killing the town’s charm.

“It’s beyond belief, it’s like living in the middle of Disneyland,” says van Bloemen from his house overlooking the bustling Old Harbour in the shadows of the stone city walls.

Tourists queue to get through the old arched entrance to Dubrovnik. Photo: Alamy

On a typical day there are about eight cruise ships visiting this city of 28,000 people, each dumping some 2,000 tourists into the streets. He recalls one day when 13 ships anchored there.

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“We feel sorry for ourselves, but also for the tourists, because they can’t feel the town any more because they are knocking into other tourists,” he says. “It’s chaos, the whole thing is chaos.”

The problem is hurting Dubrovnik’s reputation. Unesco warned last year that the city’s world heritage title was at risk because of the surge in tourist numbers.

The popular Discoverer travel blog recently wrote that a visit to Dubrovnik’s historic old town “is a highlight of any Croatian holiday, but the crowds that pack its narrow streets and passageways do not make for a quality visitor experience”.

Tourists are recommended to visit Ohrid in Macedonia, which has a similar old town but without the crowds. Photo: Alamy

It advises travellers to visit other quaint old towns nearby: “Instead of trying to be one of the lucky ones who gets a ticket to Dubrovnik’s sites, try the delightful town of Ohrid in nearby Macedonia.”

In 2017, local authorities announced a “Respect the City” plan that limits the number of tourists from cruise ships to a maximum of 4,000 at any one time during the day. The plan still has to be implemented, however.

Tourists along the Stradun in Dubrovnik. Photo: Alamy

“We are aware of the crowds,” says Romana Vlasic, the head of the city’s tourist board.

But while on the one hand she pledges to curb the number of visitors, Vlasic notes with some satisfaction that this season in Dubrovnik “is really good with a slight increase in numbers”. The success of the Croatian national soccer team at this summer’s World Cup, where it reached the final, helped bring new tourists.

Vlasic says more than 800,000 tourists have visited Dubrovnik since the start of the year, a six per cent increase from the same period last year. Overnight stays were up 4 per cent, to 3 million.

Crowds on the steep steps to the city walls in Dubrovnik. Photo: Alamy

The cruise ships pay the city harbour docking fees, but the local businesses get very little money from the visitors, who have all-inclusive packages on the ship and spend very little on local restaurants or shops.

Krunoslav Djuricic, who plays his electric guitar at Pile, one of the two main entrances of Dubrovnik’s walled city, sees the crowds pass by him all day. “Mass tourism might not be what we really need,” he says.

The tourists disembarking from the cruise ships have only a few hours to visit the city, meaning they often rush around to see the sites and take selfies to post to social media.

“We have crowds of people who are simply running,” Djuricic says. “Where are these people running to?”

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Game of Thrones city under siege from mass tourism
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