Gruž (Italian : Gravosa - Santa Croce) is a neighborhood in Dubrovnik, Croatia, about 2 km northwest of the Old City. It has a population of approximately 15,000 people. The main port for Dubrovnik is in Gruž as well as its largest market and the main bus station "Libertas". [1] While historically a manufacturing and industrial base for Dubrovnik, today it is one of the city's main residential areas along with Lapad and Mokošica.
Italian is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family. Italian, together with Sardinian, is by most measures the closest language to Vulgar Latin of the Romance languages. Italian is an official language in Italy, Switzerland, San Marino and Vatican City. It has an official minority status in western Istria. It formerly had official status in Albania, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro (Kotor) and Greece, and is generally understood in Corsica and Savoie. It also used to be an official language in the former Italian East Africa and Italian North Africa, where it plays a significant role in various sectors. Italian is also spoken by large expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. In spite of not existing any Italian community in their respective national territories and of not being spoken at any level, Italian is included de jure, but not de facto, between the recognized minority languages of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Romania. Many speakers of Italian are native bilinguals of both standardized Italian and other regional languages.
Dubrovnik is a Croatian city on the Adriatic Sea. It is one of the most prominent tourist destinations in the Mediterranean Sea, a seaport and the centre of Dubrovnik-Neretva County. Its total population is 42,615. In 1979, the city of Dubrovnik joined the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites.
Croatia, officially the Republic of Croatia, is a country at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, on the Adriatic Sea. It borders Slovenia to the northwest, Hungary to the northeast, Serbia to the east, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro to the southeast, sharing a maritime border with Italy. Its capital, Zagreb, forms one of the country's primary subdivisions, along with twenty counties. Croatia has an area of 56,594 square kilometres and a population of 4.28 million, most of whom are Roman Catholics.
From the 13th century and greatly through the 16th, Gruž was a separate town from Dubrovnik that provided a summer retreat for the inhabitants of the Republic of Ragusa. The shores, like those of Ombla, are populated with a great many stone homes and former summer palaces that are surrounded by cultivated grounds.
The Republic of Ragusa was an aristocratic maritime republic centered on the city of Dubrovnik in Dalmatia that carried that name from 1358 until 1808. It reached its commercial peak in the 15th and the 16th centuries, before being conquered by Napoleon's French Empire and formally annexed by the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy in 1808. It had a population of about 30,000 people, out of whom 5,000 lived within the city walls. Its Latin motto was "Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro", which means "Liberty is not well sold for all the gold".
Starting in December, 1910, Gruž was the terminus point for the now defunct Dubrovnik tram [2] that ceased running in 1970 following a deadly accident where the tram slipped off its rails and landed in the park in front of Pile Gate. [3] The line has since been replaced by bus routes.
Located in a naturally protected bay, the port was used an Austro-Hungarian naval facility until the end of 1918 and today is able to accommodate large passenger cruise ships. Ferries run from the port to the Elaphiti Islands and Mljet regularly. There is also a customs building for ferries that are international arrivals, specifically from Bari.
The Elaphiti Islands or the Elaphites is a small archipelago consisting of several islands stretching northwest of Dubrovnik, in the Adriatic sea. The Elaphites have a total land area of around 30 square kilometres and a population of 850 inhabitants. The islands are covered with characteristic Mediterranean evergreen vegetation and attract large numbers of tourists during the summer tourist season due to their beaches and pristine scenery.
Mljet is the southernmost and easternmost of the larger Adriatic islands of the Dalmatia region of Croatia. The National Park includes the western part of the island, Veliko jezero, Malo jezero, Soline Bay and a sea belt 500 m wide from the most prominent cape of Mljet covering an area of 54 km2. The central parts of the park are Veliko jezero with the Isle of St. Mary, Malo jezero and the villages of Goveđari, Polače and Pomena.
Bari is the capital city of the Metropolitan City of Bari and of the Apulia region, on the Adriatic Sea, in southern Italy. It is the second most important economic centre of mainland Southern Italy after Naples and Palermo, a port and university city, as well as the city of Saint Nicholas. The city itself has a population of 326,799, as of 2015, over 116 square kilometres (45 sq mi), while the urban area has 750,000 inhabitants. The metropolitan area has 1.3 million inhabitants.
Gruž sits right at the entrance to Port Ombla. It is directly across the water from Cantafigo point, which lacks anchorage points due to the shores and the bottom of the inlet being immersed by banks of mud, deposited during heavy rains. Vessels belonging to Dubrovnik spend their winters at Gruž. Violent squalls descend from the highlands bring the cold, northerly bora, but the waters in the bay of Gruž remain calm.
The bora is a northern to north-eastern katabatic wind in the Adriatic Sea. Similar nomenclature is used for north-eastern winds in other littoral areas of eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea basins.
