Thoughts on wandering Dubrovnik in off-season
A visual exploration on how and why we travel
It’s late September in Dubrovnik. The sticky summer heat has begun to loosen its reign.
The main crowds of summer have slowly dispersed.
This is off-season.
Like all other forces of nature, we travelers come and go with the seasons.
We migrate, we flock, we swarm.
And soon as we touch down in a new destination, we make ourselves known. We arrive in droves and in masses. Some liken it to a tidal wave, others an avalanche or monsoon.
Just as there’s a Summer and Autumn, a season of cherry blossoms, and the season of harvest,
There’s the Season of the Tourist.
I find myself wandering Dubrovnik after tourist high season has come to a close, yet life within the ancient walls remain bustling and busy. While we come and go with seasons, it seems as if our timeframes keep expanding—we continuously seem to linger longer.
Dubrovnik has seen massive spikes in tourism over the last years. In 2023, Dubrovnik had 4.5 million overnight stays, an 11% increase compared to 2022 numbers. Tourists outnumber Dubrovnik locals by a staggering 27-to-one.
The cobbled streets of Dubrovnik have encountered the wandering footsteps of travelers for centuries, but when did the city become so transformed by their presence?
Here, a daily occurrence: streams of cruise ship patrons filter in and out of the city’s ancient walls. In peak season, the city sees over 10,000 cruise patrons a day.
They’re loaded up in buses, shuttled in and out. Herded like sheep, they’re whisked off to their next destination at a whirlwind speed. These visitors never spend more than a few hours in one place. These modes of transport have made travel so much more accessible, but oftentimes these visitors can only ever scratch the surface of a place. Destinations soon become boxes to check, and we’re on to the next one more quickly than ever before.
Do we travel to experience anymore? Or is it to take the same pictures? Are we driven for the aesthetics of the places we see superficially, or do we still yearn to dig beneath its surface?
I often think about how the internet and social media have changed our perspectives on travel. We have list for the “Top Ten Things to Do in X”, ‘“Top 100 Places to See Before You Die”, “The Top Most Instagrammable Spots in X, Y, Z”…
They all seem to tell us where to go, what to see, and what to experience. Have we made the act of travel so replicable that we no longer truly engage with new spaces?
I wonder to myself how much of the travel we experience is novel. How much has it become a manufactured experience that can be repeated again and again? We often like to think of ourselves as the protagonists of life—that all of our experiences are unique and significant in some way—but sometimes I wonder how much of my own travels are molded by this conditioning.
Media drives our interest in far-off places and shapes the fantasies we create around travel.
Tourism in Dubrovnik boomed following the city’s role as the filming location for the mega-popular HBO series Game of Thrones. Each year, hundreds of thousands of visitors descend on the city to relish in the sights they were enamored with on their television screens.
Further down its winding streets, the city slowly becomes a caricature of itself. Game of Thrones themed restaurants, tours, costume shops…the list goes on.
At what point does a place simply become a backdrop: a site to gaze at or photograph, but not one that is fully lived-in? At what point does the value of its outward aesthetics surpass the community and life within its walls?
Strolling these ancient streets of Dubrovnik, I wonder who this space is really for.
Most locals have been priced out of Old Town Dubrovnik; they compete for space with short term vacation rentals and have largely been pushed outside of the ancient city. There is hardly a feel for any Croatian culture inside the old city—the shops and restaurants mainly cater to the tourist crowd.
And yet, contained with the city walls, we create moments of joy.
Couples embrace while overlooking the sparking salty sea. Families delight in gelato in the early Autumn heat. The busy, bright chatter of languages swirl in the air and fill the streets with noise and life.
Travel has shrunk the world—it’s wrinkled the distance between us as people. It has shortened the roads that divide us and the ‘other’, and defied the unmoving reality of geography. Despite its drawbacks, travel is first and foremost a force of connection. We do it because we love to connect to people and places; it brings joy.
People often speak of travel as a way to “get away from it all”, but what are we getting away from exactly? And what do we bring with us?