How to Navigate Dubrovnik Without the Crowds

The Pile and Ploce Gates, the two entrances into Dubrovnik’s Old Town, once had drawbridges that lifted during the overnight hours, forcing visitors wanting to enter to wait outside its stone walls until morning. The bridges no longer lift, yet the bottlenecks of morning visitors remain.

This compact, seaside city in Croatia has drawn millions of travelers from around the globe for years. Its popularity grew when HBO’s “Game of Thrones” used it as a primary location and visitors soon overwhelmed the city, particularly in the summer. Officials have introduced measures to manage the crowds without limiting the number of visitors, but according to the Croatian National Tourist Board, this year is on pace to become the city’s busiest ever.

Yet a trip to “Pearl of the Adriatic” need not require jostling with other tourists, bumping about like a stream of rambunctious salmon. Planning takes artful timing, minor sacrifices and a bit of luck. Here are six ways to start.

Game the cruise ship schedule

Dubrovnik is a mainstay on the itineraries of cruise ships navigating the Mediterranean, and 377,000 passengers disembarked last year, according to the city’s Port Authority. This year that number could jump to 500,000, as up to five ships are expected to arrive daily during the high season.

Every cruise ship’s arrival sends an avalanche of humanity barreling toward Old Town, mostly between 7 and 9 a.m. In this surge, a few hundred to several thousand people congregate at the two gates, waiting in lines of up to two hours to enter the Old Town, and then typically disperse to view the city’s biggest draws — its ramparts, the main street, or Stradun, or scenery related to “Game of Thrones.”

To avoid joining this ebb and flow of cruise ship passengers, monitor the port’s schedule online. The Port Authority’s schedule and sites like Cruise Dig offer cruise ships’ arrival times as well as the potential number of travelers disembarking. The number of passengers arriving is more important than the number of ships.

A two-hour buffer should be enough to avoid the crowd at the gates, the Jesuit Stairs (best known from the “Walk of Shame” scene in “Game of Thrones”) or the city’s other major attractions.

The city also offers Dubrovnik Visitors, an online resource that estimates how crowded the Old Town is at any moment, and also uses machine learning to forecast visitor numbers during future dates.

Ditch the golden-hour photo shoot

The city’s…