Recently we decided to launch our Youtube channel (subscribe and follow us if you like outdoor topics) and start to make documentary videos about our travels and we made a short documentary about this underground military shelter near the city of Ploce. We have been occupied with photography for so long time and didn’t do much in a form of a video. We are not stopping with photography but we believe video can make a huge difference in what we are doing.
If you are staying in the city of Ploce or near it, and you are interested in these kinds of military structures, it would be a shame not to visit it.
Here you can watch the video of it and read more information in the text below:
We weren’t able to find much information about it online although we did our best. But nevertheless, we discovered some useful information only by going through it.
where is it located
The shelter is situated near the city of Ploce and very close to Bacina lakes. A good thing about it is its proximity to the main road connecting the Ploce with Split and Dubrovnik. The shelter is just a few minutes of walk away from the main road. It’s even accessible by car, but since the road is unpaved we don’t recommend it. There is a parking lot on the road so you can park your car there and take a short walk.
Descending down the vertical escape shaft
how does it look like
Well, first of all, it’s not as big as some other similar military structures in Croatia, but its proximity to the road makes it worth visiting. The atomic shelter consists of U shaped tunnel and 11 separated chambers inside the tunnel. Some more rooms can be found in the tunnel as well. Some of them were used for storage of ammunition and one room was used as a generator room for powering the whole shelter. Those 11 separated rooms were probably used as sleeping chambers. At the end of these, there is a vertical shaft going straight up and exiting in the middle of the hill. This shaft was probably used as an escape route in case of an attack.
Inside the 11 chambers part of the shelter
what was it part of
The city of Ploce has a rich military past, starting with the WW2. Many bunkers were built around and almost every hilltop has at least one bunker on top of it. This underground bunker/atomic shelter was a part of a bunker network on a hill above it. Since there are no army barracks near these bunkers, they constructed this shelter. On the top of the hill above, there are remnants of 2 bunkers and many more fortified positions used to guard this area. From the hilltop, you can see almost all of the Bacina lakes, the village of Bacina, and the main road. The road was probably the reason why the bunkers were situated in this place since it’s a very important road.
Exploring the shelter’s exterior
future of the atomic shelter
The underground shelter is left to slowly decay. Thieves looted almost everything there is to loot. The power generator from the generator room is gone. Every piece of the iron they could take was taken and sold to scrap metal. Fortunately, the massive doors are still there and intact. A possible reason for it is their weight.
In the U shaped tunnel
However, the future of this atomic shelter could be bright. It can become one of the attractions of the Ploce area. It can become a winery or a thematic cafe. Although, we are not sure that it can meet all of the necessary certificates it needs to have for that purpose. The renovation of this object would cost a lot and take some time in case somebody wants to open a cafe there. But for the sole purpose of visiting it, it should only be cleaned a bit and everything could be done by a few persons in a few days.
