Fort Royal

This guide to Fort Royal, the circular battery atop Lokrum island near Dubrovnik, opens with the shriek of a peacock, one of a colony said to descend from birds an Austrian archduke shipped in from the Canary Islands. It traces the fort's construction by French engineers in 1806 and its completion by Austria in 1835 to guard the sea approach to the city, then turns to Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, shaken by a nearby naval disaster into buying the island and building a summer villa and gardens in the valley below. Stand at the wall and watch one strut through the grass where French gunners once kept watch.