Dubrovnik, Croatia: A mysterious 700-year-old pharmacy hidden inside a monastery

An open book sits on a narrow bench, its yellowed pages illustrated with botanical drawings of strange-looking herbs. To the side, a hand-painted table is littered with brass weights and medicine jars, strewn about as if Dr Jekyll himself has just left the building. In one corner an alcove is strung with chalices and chains.

"The Old Town of Dubrovnik is home to the third oldest operating pharmacy in Europe," our local guide Vesna says. She points to an array of implements that look as if they've come from a torturer's toolbox. "Yet most visitors don't know about it."

Through the Pile Gate and a side step beyond the main thoroughfare (Placa) we've stumbled upon a 700-year-old apothecary hidden inside a 14th-century Franciscan monastery. "The friars had more than 2000 recipes," Vesna says. "Everything from quite ordinary drugs to secret poisons and potions."

We had set out early with Vesna, walking the city walls before the crowds arrived, meeting artisans, taking shortcuts like the locals, and, when a sudden storm sent day trippers scurrying back to their cruise ships, finding ourselves inside a medieval pharmacy.

That's the joy of joining a small group tour like Gypsian Boutique Tours, a family-run business which gives you the chance to stay a few nights inside the Old Town, not a few hours.

Inside the museum (included with the Dubrovnik Card) we learn that the Friars Minor pharmacy has been in the health care business since 1317, when the monastery was established after being shifted inside the city walls from the Pile area.

Friars, it turns out, were the original pharmacists, a skill borne of their desire to take care of their sick brothers, as well as the wider community. Over the centuries they painstakingly reproduced their findings in pharmaceutical manuscripts and books.

The monastery library is considered to be one of the most significant in Croatia, a wealth of 20,000 treasures, including manuscripts, parchment fragments, paintings and a complete set of calligraphic books with instructions on how to "ease the pain of one's neighbour".

For me, the joy of travel is less about ticking big-ticket items and more about finding random threads that pull the tapestry of a city's history together; such as the pockmarks as evidence of shelling during the 1991 siege of Dubrovnik; a surviving sculpture of the Pieta from the 1667 great earthquake; a tablet with information about the 20,000 Dubrovnik residents who died of the plague in 1527.