This year's Dubrovnik Winter Festival program has been presented in the Croatian capital of Zagreb, the Dalmatian capital of Split and the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana.
Dubrovnik is well known as a summer destination and the city's glorious summer festival which celebrates everything to do with the arts has been popular for over sixty years, particularly in the closer region. While Dubrovnik may have a lot on offer and has absolutely no issue attracting visitors during the hot summer months, what does it offer when the temperatures drop and the waves start rolling in?
The classic ''summer destination'' label is one that Croatia is trying to shake off as a whole, with various conscious efforts to promote the country as a year-round destination beginning to succeed, the figures speak for themselves and it seems even Dubrovnik, which has a particularly difficult time shaking off the ''summer time only'' tag, is managing to attract more and more visitors outside of the summer months. Finally, airlines and travel companies are starting to catch on to the idea that there are people in the world who actually want to visit outside of the June-August window and that Dubrovnik cannot really be placed in the same category as certain Spanish and Greek destinations - names shall not be named, you hopefully already know to what and where what I'm referring.
Croatia has enormous potential as a year-round destination and we bang on about that a lot, and with very good reason. From city breaks to adventure, adrenaline, gastronomic, sustainable, cycling and even dental and health tourism being among its huge sources of relatively untapped potential, it seems a crying shame that the vast majority of the country still relies so heavily on that three month window between June and August. However, as previously mentioned, it seems that things are slowly but surely beginning to change, even for the terribly overlooked continential regions.
Dubrovnik's increasingly popular winter festival may just appear to be one of the many good efforts to keep the country's most popular coastal destinations living and breathing outside of summer, but it is by far the most significant when it comes to Dubrovnik, the city that, if any, has become somewhat of a victim of its own wild popularity which tends to gravitate solely around an exhausting and hazy summer time.
As Dubrovacki Dnevnik writes on the 13th of November, 2017, this year's rich festival program has been presented and met with positivity in the beautiful Slovenian capital of Ljubljana, as well as in Split and in Zagreb, which has become an extremely popular and very hard to match advent destination of late.
Dubrovnik's Tourist board, along with music from Klapa Kase, traditional folklore and of course, local delicacies such as prikle (fritule for those from outside of the Dubrovnik area), arancini and more, not only presented 2017's cultural, musical and gastronomical winter festival and advent program, but showcased the Pearl of the Adriatic as a city that continues on existing outside of summer.
If you're the type of person who wants to truly experience a place for everything that it really is, and not just get a quick taste of the mask it wears during the crowded, hot summer, then visiting Dubrovnik in the winter is the ideal time to get a real feel for what this tiny medieval city is all about. Being overheated, battling through crowds and paying over the odds for cheap fridge magnets in a sea of cruise ship passengers is not Dubrovnik's identity, at all.
To find out more about what awaits us this year and when, click here.
