Ploče
Ploče sits where the Neretva River makes its final push to the Adriatic, and the town wears its industrial purpose without apology. The port — Croatia's second-largest cargo terminal — dominates the waterfront, cranes and grain silos rising against a backdrop of karst hills and open sea. What stretches between them is said to be the longest waterfront in Croatia, and walking it, you get a city that has never quite decided whether it belongs to the coast or the interior.
That ambiguity is the point. Ploče is the place where a railway from Sarajevo ends, where ferries cross to Pelješac, where the delta begins. It is less a destination than a hinge — and the more you understand that, the more interesting it becomes.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to arrive by the seasonal train from Sarajevo — Friday evenings, summer only — and say the approach through the Neretva gorge is reason enough. They eat along the waterfront, catch the Trpanj ferry early, and treat the Yugoslav-era concrete towers as the landmarks they genuinely are. The old locomotive at the railway station is worth a pause.
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Book directly at the providerHow Ploče came to be
The name Ploča appears in records as early as 1387, but the modern town is essentially a creation of the late 1930s. Construction of the port began in 1939 under the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, when it was briefly called Aleksandrovo after King Alexander I. The war interrupted everything — the harbour was destroyed and had to be rebuilt, formally reopening on July 15, 1945.
Socialist Yugoslavia renamed it Kardeljevo twice, bracketing a brief return to Ploče between 1954 and 1980, before the original name was restored permanently in 1990. The real growth came in the mid-1960s, when the Adriatic Highway opened and the standard-gauge Sarajevo–Ploče railway began running, pulling the town into a wider network that the breakup of Yugoslavia would later sever. The rail link to Bosnia and Herzegovina was partially restored in summer 2022.
Who and what shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Summers are short, hot and mostly clear — August averages 31°C at the high end, and Ploče holds Croatia's all-time heat record of 42.8°C set in August 1981. Winters are long, wet and cold, with November the rainiest month by some distance; if you're coming for the waterfront rather than the port, late spring or early September is the better call.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.