Cable Car & Mount Srđ

The original cable car was installed in 1969 — the first and only cable car station on the entire Adriatic coast. For twenty-two years it ferried passengers 778 metres up Mount Srđ in a gentle three-and-a-half-minute ride. Then, in December 1991, Serbian and Montenegrin forces shelling Dubrovnik destroyed it completely. The cable car was gone. The mountain became a battlefield.

It took nearly two decades and five million euros to rebuild. The new cable car reopened in 2010 with modern cabins holding 32 passengers each, and on a clear day the views stretch up to 60 kilometres — far enough to see the coast of Italy. Below you, the terracotta rooftops of the Old Town spread out in an orange grid against the blue Adriatic, and it becomes immediately obvious why UNESCO put this place on the World Heritage list.

At the summit sits Fort Imperial, built by Napoleon between 1806 and 1812 after the French ended the Republic of Ragusa. Napoleon, who had an eye for strategic hilltops, finished construction on August 15, 1812 — which happened to be his own birthday. The fort saw its most intense action not during the Napoleonic era but during the 1991 siege, when Croatian defenders held Mount Srđ against vastly superior Yugoslav forces in a battle that helped save the city below.

Fort Imperial now houses the Museum of the Homeland War, a sobering collection of photographs, equipment, and personal items from the 1991-1995 conflict. The juxtaposition is striking: you ride up in a tourist gondola, step out to one of the most beautiful views in Europe, then walk into a museum about the war that almost destroyed it all.