Botanical Gardens

This guide to the Botanical Gardens on Lokrum island near Dubrovnik opens with a monks' curse: expelled by Napoleon's soldiers in 1798, the island's last Benedictine brothers are said to have warned that whoever claimed Lokrum for personal pleasure would be damned. It follows Archduke Maximilian of Austria, who bought this very plot in 1859 regardless, terracing its beds and importing eucalyptus and cactus from as far as Australia, and releasing the peacocks whose descendants still roam these paths. Walk the paths he laid out in the shade, past plants brought here from three continents.