Panoramic Terrace above the Old City of Dubrovnik

At the edge of Mount Srđ now stands the cable car’s upper station, with three terraces, telescopes, a restaurant, and an amphitheater; the former terrace did not survive the destruction. A cable seven hundred seventy-eight meters long runs to this building, crossing the slope at a single forty-meter support. From an elevation of four hundred five meters, the ring of walls, the Old Port, Lokrum, and the dense development of the Old City of Dubrovnik gather below the mountain.

In the late nineteen sixties, Veljko Kavurčić and his colleagues decided to turn this edge of Mount Srđ into the final stop on a city tour. Kavurčić was the founder and long-serving director of Atlas, Dubrovnik’s tourist company. It grew out of the local branch of the Yugoslav agency Putnik and made money from transport, boat trips, and excursion routes. The cable car itself was meant to become a route that a traveler would be willing to pay for.

Atlas was acquiring buses and vessels at the time, but the lift required a far greater stake: two stations, cables, a support on the slope, and a steady flow of passengers. There was no ready-made example nearby. The Dubrovnik Cable Car became the first and, for many years, the only one on the Adriatic coast.

The builders placed the upper station at an elevation of four hundred five meters for this very view. From here, the ring of walls, the Old Port, the island of Lokrum, and all the dense development inside the fortifications fit into a single frame. In nineteen sixty-nine, the first fifteen-passenger cabins began bringing passengers here. Millions of people came up over the following decades. The military summit, with the neighboring fort, acquired a daily tourist purpose: to bring a person to the edge, keep them at the panorama, and return them to the city.

In nineteen ninety-one, the cable car was destroyed. The upper station remained wrecked for nearly two decades; its remains were dismantled before new construction. In the summer of two thousand ten, people once again set the cabins running along the former route between Ploče and Mount Srđ.

The old terrace has not survived to the present day. The railings belong to the new upper-station complex, which contains three viewing terraces with telescopes, a restaurant, and an amphitheater. What remains of Kavurčić’s plan is the route: seven hundred seventy-eight meters of cable across the single forty-meter support. It still ends at the very edge that Dubrovnik tourism workers chose for the panorama in the late nineteen sixties.