A Polish tourist has gone public with a €3,000 parking penalty from Dubrovnik — issued for two drives through the city's restricted traffic zone, and arriving more than a year after his holiday ended. The story has been picked up widely in Polish media, and other former visitors are reporting similar surprise bills.

Dubrovnik introduced a special traffic regime around its historic centre on 2 June 2025. The idea is straightforward: the walled old town has been choked by vehicle traffic for years, so the city now restricts which cars can enter the zone at all. What's less straightforward, according to travellers caught out, is everything else.

The complainant, who contacted Croatian news outlet Index, says he received two separate fines of €1,500 each for two entries into the zone, and that the law firms the city hires to pursue these penalties are nearly impossible to reach — he says his emails went unanswered. He acknowledges that warning signs exist, but argues they don't clearly explain how a visitor gets permission to drive in, and that the sums involved are wildly out of proportion to the offence. Polish TV stations and websites have been covering the wave of complaints, and the case has clearly touched a nerve among a nationality that sends a lot of summer visitors to Croatia.

There's an odd discrepancy worth knowing about: the City of Dubrovnik's own published fine schedule is much lower — €260 for individuals, €660 for tradespeople and sole operators, and €1,320 for companies, with an extra €260 for a company's responsible person. The €1,500-per-entry figure the tourist describes suggests either added enforcement costs, escalation for non-payment, or debt-collection fees layered on top. Either way, the practical lesson is the same: the bills can balloon well past what you'd expect from a parking mistake, and they can land long after you've flown home.

For anyone planning a trip to Dubrovnik, the takeaway is simple. Do not drive into or park around the old town unless you have confirmed, documented permission. Public parking garages sit outside the restricted zone, and the old town is small enough to explore entirely on foot anyway. If you do receive a fine after your trip, respond quickly and in writing — chasing correspondence a year later, possibly from another country, is clearly a frustrating route. Renting a car for a Dalmatian coast road trip is still a great call; just treat Dubrovnik's centre as strictly a park-outside-and-walk destination.

This matters to travellers because enforcement here is clearly active, automated or at least retrospective, and the penalties are anything but symbolic. A missed sign on a Croatian summer holiday shouldn't cost the price of a flight — but in Dubrovnik right now, it evidently can.