In the focus of this research is the development and changes of the Renaissance gardens of the villas Bona-Caboga and Stay-Caboga, a rare example in the Dubrovnik area, where a garden embraces in terms of both style and period of construction two villas into a unique complex. The villas with the garden are located at Batahovina in Rijeka Dubrovacka, a narrow inlet only a few kilometres from the historic nucleus of the City of Dubrovnik. During the Dubrovnik Republic (1358-1806), the territory of Rijeka Dubrovacka proved ideal for cultivation due to the benefits of mild climate, fertile soil and abundant water resources. In the fourteenth and fifteenth century, simple buildings used for harvest storage were built in this area. From the end of the fifteenth, and notably in the sixteenth century, at the time of the Republic's economic prosperity, Ragusan nobility started building representative country complexes in Rijeka Dubrovacka, which initially served both farming and leisure. Some fifty of them were known to cluster along a five-kilometre stretch of Rijeka Dubrovacka. Their construction also reflected the trends that prevailed in the Renaissance Italy. Villas in the Dubrovnik area were usually located on the very coast and were protected by high stone walls. The complex consisted of a building and garden. The building had a typical L-ground plan. The garden bears all the Renaissance features--orthogonal system of main and side paths, some of which covered by a pergola. Water features in the form of a pool with sea water, wall fountains and cisterns. Sculptures are rare. This type of the Renaissance garden is known as Dubrovnik Renaissance garden as a typological synonym of the Renaissance garden. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the walled complexes were surrounded by farming land which, because of the steep slopes of Rijeka Dubrovacka, was laid out in terraces supported by dry-wall structures. The plot on which the villas Bona-Caboga and Stay-Caboga were constructed has been rearranged and rebuilt by a succession of owners. The paper traces the borders of the first estate on this location according to the Libro negro del Astarea, the second oldest cadastral register of the Dubrovnik Republic, which shows that the space where the two villas and their gardens were constructed was originally part of one whole. The first known villa on this site, villa Bona-Caboga, was constructed in the period 1520-1540. The second villa Stay-Caboga was constructed in the latter half of the sixteenth century. At that time each villa had its own garden space. On the basis of the available documents, archival data, Franciscan cadastral register from 1837., garden designs from the mid-twentieth century, numerous historical photographs from the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but also field work, three historic layers of the garden have been identified: Renaissance layer, Romantic layer with the features of historicism, and the twentieth-century layer. According to the established criteria, the historic layers of the garden have been evaluated as a starting point for the renovation, revitalization and promotion of the villa and garden complex. Renaissance features are primarily discerned in the fact that the villa Bona-Caboga integrated into the landscape--up to the first floor it was dug into the terrain. Thus the first floor of the building had direct access to the back gardens by which the boundary between closed and open space was negated. The gardens were organized on three levels and became part of the house. The garden ground-plans are simple, resulting from the spatial characteristics. Both villas and their gardens stand on a very narrow coastal belt. The construction of the villa Bona-Caboga follows a typical Renaissance pattern in which the main path runs along the axis of the house, dividing the house and the garden into two approximately equal parts. The front of the house faced onto the main path flanked by rectangular garden patches. A single-axis garden design of the villa Stay-Caboga is completely independent of the interior layout of the house itself. The main path covered by the pergola follows the facade of the house until the border with the villa Bona-Caboga. The path is also the skeleton of the orthogonal pat tern which once included transversed garden patches, side paths, pond and cisterns. By the turn of the twentieth century, the villa gardens were physically reunited into a unique complex and thoroughly redesigned thanks to the zeal of the last owner of the two estates, Bernard Henrik Caboga. The reshaping included a significant deflection from the hitherto applied Renaissance pattern which, over the past centuries, remained a constant feature in most of Dubrovnik's country complexes. The changes in design reflected the current European trends where many public and private gardens were redesigned in the Romantic spirit under the influence of the English landscape style, with emphasis on the gardenesque style. The Renaissance path in the lower part of the garden was removed, and the main feature of the new arrangement was the organically shaped path bordered with exotic plants. The most valuable section of the Romantic layer is the upper part of the garden with a representative pathway, which provided a modern interpretation of Dubrovnik's traditional building samples. In the twentieth century, the villas and the garden witnessed decay and inadequate interventions. With the construction of the Adriatic Highway in 1963, half of the wing of the villa Stay-Caboga was demolished, and the route simply devoured a part of the garden onto which both villas faced. One of the main factors of the garden's preservation is the preservation of its identity, which implies coherence of the villas' gardens in a unique whole. Considering the results of the evaluation process, a need for the application of the reminiscent methods has been suggested with regard to the Renaissance and Romantic design in the lower part of the garden, bearing in mind the altered spatial relations which do not allow consistent reconstruction of any single layer. In the upper part of the garden, given the criteria of originality, preservation and value of the Romantic garden elements, the reconstruction method is imperative. According to the criteria stated, the proposed garden evaluation concept can serve as basis for the renovation of other villas in the Dubrovnik area.