Uvala Lapad Beach

This guide to Uvala Lapad Beach in Dubrovnik traces the unlikely bet local businessmen made in 1911, when a new tram line reached the Lapad peninsula and they decided a fishing cove known as Saint Martin's Bathing Place was worth more as a resort than as anchorage. It follows Hotel Lapad, one of the first purpose-built hotels on this coast, and the working families, not aristocrats, who ran it themselves, through to the second hotel that rose along the same shore in 1938. Between the wars the guide pictures striped umbrellas and rented deck chairs filling the bay under the same pines that still shade it today. Look out at the calm, shallow water and imagine the gamble that first put a hotel here.