Porporela

This guide to the Porporela in Dubrovnik follows two and a half centuries of shipwrecks in the Old Port, from a 1617 breakwater sketch by Mihajlo Hranjac to the fifteenth-century Kase breakwater built under Paskoje Milicevic. It traces how the harbor's exposed southern flank kept costing the Republic's merchants dearly, until Austrian engineers Marco Nonveiller and Marin Boriani closed the gap decades after the old Republic had fallen. Stand on the curved stone at dusk, where locals gather to watch the light over Lokrum.