Lokrum Island lies 600 metres south of Dubrovnik's Old Port, close enough that medieval monks rowed to vespers and back before dawn. The Benedictines planted the first botanical specimens in 1192, and their cloistered garden survived six centuries of plague, siege, and imperial handover. When Napoleon's officers dissolved the monastery in 1798, the abandoned courtyards filled with wild fennel and Aleppo pine, a rewilding that proved irreversible. Today the island holds protected status within the Lokrum Nature Reserve, its 72 hectares laced with marked trails that thread between salt lakes, fortress ruins, and groves thick enough to block the midday sun. Betina Cave punctures the northern shoreline three kilometres west, a sea-level grotto carved by winter swells into the Konavle cliffs. The cave mouth measures fifteen metres across at high tide, wide enough for small boats to nose into the turquoise shallows where light refracts through submerged limestone. Local fishermen sheltered here during storms long before the route became a standard stop on Dubrovnik's coastal itineraries. The water inside stays two degrees cooler than the open Adriatic, a thermal pocket that draws schools of damselfish and the occasional loggerhead turtle. Lokrum Island and Betina Cave boat tour departures run hourly from Dubrovnik's harbour between April and October, the ferries threading a route that follows the old city walls before turning south. The island's public ferry drops passengers at the western jetty, a stone quay rebuilt in 1964 after the original Napoleonic dock collapsed. From there, a paved footpath climbs through holm oak forest to Fort Royal, the circular Austrian fortress that crowns Lokrum's highest point at 96 metres above sea level. The botanical garden occupies the monastery's former vegetable plots, its collection organized by Mediterranean climate zone rather than taxonomy—a layout unchanged since the 1960s when Yugoslav botanists replanted the beds. The combined boat excursion format became standard in 2018, when Dubrovnik's harbour authority consolidated overlapping routes to reduce congestion inside the Old Port. Betina Cave now anchors the northern leg of most coastal tours, paired with Lokrum as the southern terminus. The round-trip journey covers roughly twelve nautical miles and includes the €30 nature reserve entrance fee, a levy that funds trail maintenance and marine patrol within the protected zone.