Two Informative Texts: 21st and 19th Century Travel Writing (Paper 2)

Here is the beginning of the 21st C text, ideal to teach informative writing for Question 5, or how to analyse informative features, for Question 4.

Dubrovnik: city of nightmares, or city of dreams?

There are few less likely victims of war. Dubrovnik’s thick stone walls stand defiantly on cliff tops, cradled by mountains, an imposing and forbidding barrier to siege. Soldiers would fire down from a hundred feet up, from fortifications far taller than the puny castles you might be used to at home. Magnificent walls, the backdrop to a charming harbour.

Yet, as you walk the battlements, gasping at the beauty of the town enclosed within the womb shaped walls, you are struck by a subtle shift in colour. New, tiled roofs abound, like an orange carpet. In 1991 the Serbians attacked from the skies, dropping missiles to spread terror in this most beautiful of preserved cities. The miracle of design, three and four-foot-thick walls built to defeat earthquakes, astonishingly swallowed up the fires and explosions from the skies. The flames burnt out, starved of fuel, even where whole streets are only about eight feet apart.

So yes. Dubrovnik is something of a miracle, a survivor with its whole history intact.