Nine Kilometres of Somebody Else's Coast

The bus out of Split runs down the motorway to Ploče, drops onto the coast road, and then does something it could not have done before the summer of 2022. It turns right, out over the water on a line of white pylons, and misses Bosnia entirely. Twenty minutes later it is on the Pelješac peninsula and nobody has looked at a passport.

The Pelješac Bridge is 2,404 metres long, cable-stayed, carried on six pylons with five main spans of 285 metres, and it opened to traffic on 26 July 2022. It crosses the Bay of Mali Ston from Komarna on the mainland to the peninsula, and it exists for exactly one reason: to connect Croatia to a piece of Croatia without leaving Croatia. The obstacle is about nine kilometres of road that belongs to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it has been in the way since 1699.

A buffer bought in 1699

The Republic of Ragusa — Dubrovnik — was a small maritime state that survived for five centuries by never fighting anybody it could pay instead. Its permanent problem was Venice. At Karlowitz in 1699 it handed two short strips of its own coast to the Ottoman Empire, one at Neum in the north and one at Sutorina in the south, on purpose: the point was to put the sultan physically between Ragusa and Venetian Dalmatia, so that any Venetian move on the republic became a move on the Ottoman Empire. The arrangement was confirmed at Passarowitz in 1718. It was cynical, it was cheap, and it worked.

The Ottomans left. Austria-Hungary came and went. Yugoslavia drew Neum into the Bosnian republic as an internal administrative matter, and in 1992 that internal line became an international frontier. Bosnia and Herzegovina emerged with roughly twenty kilometres of coastline, no commercial port on any of it, and the only road between Split and Dubrovnik running straight through the middle. When Croatia joined the European Union on 1 July 2013, that road became an external EU border crossed twice by every lorry, ambulance and tour bus going south.

A republic once paid to put a foreign power on its own doorstep, because the alternative was Venice. Three centuries later its successor paid again, in euros, to go round the result.

Who built it, and with whose money

Croatia had wanted this bridge since the 1990s and could not afford it. The European Union paid about 85 per cent of the project, roughly €357 million from the Cohesion Fund — which makes it a bridge between two parts of one member state, paid for mostly by the other twenty-six.

The construction contract went to China Road and Bridge Corporation, a state-owned arm of China Communications Construction Company, which won the 2018 tender at around €279 million and undercut the Austrian and Italian consortia bidding against it. The steel box segments were fabricated in China and shipped in. It was the largest EU-funded infrastructure project inside a member state ever built by a Chinese state contractor, and it produced a long argument in Brussels about whether European firms could win comparable work in China. That argument eventually produced the EU's International Procurement Instrument in 2022 — years too late to have any bearing on this bridge.

The objection from underneath

Bosnia and Herzegovina objected on the grounds that a bridge across the mouth of its bay would seal off its access to the open sea. The answer was engineering: 55 metres of clearance above the water and 285 metres between the piers, enough for anything that could plausibly want to reach Neum. Since Neum has no cargo port and Bosnian sea freight moves through the Croatian port of Ploče under a transit agreement, the shipping objection was thin and everyone involved knew it. The real objection was about facts on the ground. A maritime border agreement signed in 1999 has never been ratified, and a permanent structure across the water settles a question Sarajevo would rather leave open.

What it changed

Half an hour saved on a quiet day; on an August afternoon with both Neum border posts backed up, several. The saving grew five months after opening, when Croatia adopted the euro and joined the Schengen area on 1 January 2023 and the crossings at Neum became a hard external frontier with the checks to match. Neum itself lost the trade that came from being unavoidable — the cheap fuel, the cigarettes, the coffee stop, the coachload that had to stop anyway. It is now a place you choose to drive to, which is a different economy and a considerably smaller one.

If you take the bus from Split to Dubrovnik, check which way it goes. Most services now use the bridge, which is toll-free; a few still run the old D8 through Neum, which means two border posts, a passport out of the bag twice, and in high summer an hour of nothing at all. There is a car park with a full view of the span at Komarna, on the northern approach. From the far end, Ston is twenty minutes away and Korčula about ninety, which is the other thing the bridge did: it turned Pelješac into an easy day out of Split, and the peninsula has not finished deciding what it thinks about that.