Entrepreneurs in Dubrovnik-Neretva County recorded significant growth in revenue, profit, and employment in 2024, according to consolidated financial statements published by Fina.

Total revenues reached €2.43 billion, a rise of 15.2 percent compared with the previous year, marking the highest revenue growth among all Croatian counties.

Expenses also grew, climbing 14 percent to €2.18 billion. Despite this, pre-tax profit increased to €307.7 million, up 17.9 percent year-on-year, while net profit surged by 28.2 percent to €212.2 million. Losses before tax decreased from €62.9 million to €55.1 million.

Employment and Wages on the Rise

The positive trend extended to the labor market. The number of employees grew by 1,450 to a total of 23,169, representing an increase of 6.7 percent. Average monthly net salaries rose from €967 to €1,097, a jump of 13.4 percent. Altogether, net wages and salaries paid out amounted to nearly €305 million, which is 21 percent more than in 2023.

Strong Assets and Equity Growth

The total assets and liabilities of entrepreneurs surpassed €5 billion, an increase of 17.9 percent. Equity and reserves expanded by more than a quarter (26.3 percent), while long-term and short-term liabilities rose by 12.3 percent and 11.3 percent, respectively.

Export Strength and Surplus Trade Balance

Exports reached €402.9 million, up 15 percent compared with 2023, while imports rose by 16.4 percent to €102.4 million. This left the county with a robust trade surplus of €300.6 million. The number of exporters increased to 339, while importers rose to 541.

Investments Slowed

Despite the strong financial performance, entrepreneurs invested less in new long-term assets. Investments dropped by €60.7 million, or 11.1 percent, compared with the previous year. The number of investors slightly decreased to 473, while the number of companies that did not invest rose to 4,341.

The wider Dubrovnik region was hit by strong southerly winds, heavy rain and thunder today, as unstable weather swept across the Adriatic.

Gusts of the jugo wind brought rough seas and grey skies, while downpours disrupted parts of the city and surrounding areas.

According to forecasts, the unsettled conditions will continue into tomorrow, with more wind and rain expected. However, from Tuesday onwards the weather is set to stabilise, bringing calmer seas, lighter winds and warmer, more settled conditions lasting into the weekend.

This September, I travelled to Toluca to present my new collection of short stories, El amor está en otra parte, at the Feria Internacional del Libro del Estado de México (FILEM). Book fairs are always intense—long days of panels, conversations, and hurried coffees—but in the quiet of the hotel at night, I found myself accompanied by another voice. For four nights, Alma Delia Murillo’s novel My Father’s Head became my companion. It was the book I carried back from the noise of the fair to the silence of my room, the book that demanded my attention when everything else finally paused.

I am deeply grateful to Fondo Editorial del Estado de México (FOEM), Consejo Editorial de la Administración Pública Estatal (CEAPE), and Alejandra Bonfil for their support and logistical assistance, which made my participation in FILEM possible.

Murillo’s writing is unflinching. Her prose does not soften the edges of violence, memory, or desire; instead, it confronts them head-on, with the kind of honesty that makes you both recoil and lean closer. Some passages are breathtakingly beautiful, while others are difficult to endure—particularly those involving sexual violence. And yet, it is precisely this intensity that makes the book impossible to forget.

Reading My Father’s Head, I couldn’t help but think of my own father. He was not absent, as Murillo’s father was, but he was distant, angry, impossible to please. For years, I tried to earn his approval, until I realised that was a door that would never open. We have not spoken in years now. Outside the family, people thought of him as a good man, a good father. That double vision—the father you long for, and the father you live with—runs like a quiet current beneath Murillo’s book, and it is what made the novel strike so close to home for me.

This tension—between longing and reality—finds a striking expression in Chapter 10, The Cursed Decade. It’s raw and unsettling, yet luminous in its honesty. Murillo dares to look where many of us would rather not, and in doing so, she reminds us that literature is not about comfort, but about truth. Like the best of Mexican contemporary writing, her work insists on confronting the fractures in our lives.

Murillo belongs in the company of writers such as Brenda Navarro and Fernanda Melchor—authors who refuse to look away, who render violence and intimacy with a language that is both harsh and poetic. But she is also distinctly her own: her novel is both a confession and a reckoning, personal yet expansive, a story about one father that speaks to anyone who has ever wrestled with family, memory, and identity.

At its heart, My Father’s Head is not only about loss, but about what remains: the silences, the unspoken longing, the fragments of love we piece together from absence. Murillo writes with a clarity that is sometimes brutal, sometimes tender, always necessary.

When I closed the book on my last night in Toluca, I felt that I had not only read a novel but lived alongside it. Murillo had reminded me that our stories, no matter how private, always echo larger ones. That literature is, at its best, a bridge between our solitary experiences and the shared human condition.

If you’ve never read Alma Delia Murillo before, My Father’s Head is where you should begin. It will unsettle you, move you, and demand your attention. It might even make you reflect on your own father, as it did for me. And perhaps that is the book’s greatest achievement: it dares to make us remember, even when remembering is the hardest thing to do.

As for me, these reflections also accompany my own writing journey. My new collection of short stories, El amor está en otra parte, also grapples with memory, love, and the absences that shape us. If you’d like to continue this conversation about literature, memory, and the lives we inherit, I invite you to read me too—and to join me on Instagram (@akemigotoo), where I share fragments of writing and the paths that stories open.

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Alejandra Gotóo (Mexico City, 1991) writes to explain herself the world where she inhabits. Her work has been published in Spain, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Croatia. She holds a master's degree in Social Anthropology and a bachelor's degree in English Literature. Nowadays, she is a columnist in Dubrovnik Times. She has two published novels, Ruptura and Isadore or Absolute Love. Her topics of interest include nature, adventure, language, books, food, culture, animals, conservation, and women's rights. She also writes in her blog: Cardinal Humours.

Housing prices in Croatia continued their steep climb in the second quarter of 2025, according to fresh data from the Croatian Bureau of Statistics (DZS).

Overall, prices of residential properties rose 4.4% compared to the first quarter, while on an annual basis the increase accelerated to 13.2%.

Newly built homes recorded a more modest rise, up 1.5% on the quarter and 11% higher than a year earlier. Existing housing stock saw sharper growth, with prices up 5.2% compared to Q1 and 13.7% year-on-year.

The rise varied across regions. Compared with the previous quarter:

• Zagreb prices rose 3.3%,

• Adriatic coast prices climbed 5.1%,

• Other regions surged 5.6%.

Annual data show a broad-based rise: prices in Zagreb were up 12.2%, the Adriatic by 12.3%, while other regions saw the sharpest increase at 18.2%.

The latest figures underscore the ongoing pressure in Croatia’s property market, driven by strong demand, limited supply, and rising costs of construction.