Bay of Kotor, Montenegro

The walls of Kotor’s Old Town climb approximately 4.5 kilometres up the mountain directly behind the city, reaching the fortress of San Giovanni at 280 metres above sea level. The climb takes about 45 minutes and the view from the top looks down over the entire inner bay – the water, the medieval rooftops, and the limestone mountains that drop into the Adriatic on every side. The Bay of Kotor is not a true fjord (those require glacial formation; this bay was created by the flooding of a river canyon) but in terms of what you see from that fortress wall, the distinction is academic.

The bay covers roughly 87 square kilometres, penetrating 28 kilometres inland from the Adriatic. The mountains that enclose it rise to over 1,800 metres. The combination of enclosed sea, medieval towns, and vertical limestone produces a landscape unlike anything else on the Adriatic coast. The bay and the Kotor Old Town are UNESCO World Heritage Site, designated in 1979.

Kotor Old Town

The Old Town is enclosed by medieval walls built primarily during Venetian rule (Venice controlled the bay from 1420 to 1797). The Cathedral of Saint Tryphon has twin Romanesque towers dating to 1166; the older tower survived a 1667 earthquake, the other was rebuilt. The Maritime Museum of Montenegro in a 17th-century Baroque palace covers the region’s seafaring history across three floors.

The town is genuinely medieval in its physical structure: narrow alleys, hidden squares, unexpected staircases, and the slightly disorienting experience of getting lost in a space where every turn looks approximately the same until it doesn’t. This is a feature rather than a flaw.

Perast

Perast, about 12 kilometres from Kotor along the inner bay road, is a small baroque town with an extraordinarily disproportionate number of grand palazzos along its waterfront. At its 17th and 18th-century peak, the town owned 100 ships and 1,500 sailors. Today it has a few hundred residents. The waterfront palaces of sea captains are the evidence of what it was.

From Perast’s waterfront, boats run to Our Lady of the Rocks: a man-made islet created over centuries by sailors dropping stones around a submerged rock. The church on it was built in 1630 and contains 68 votive silver tablets and an icon of the Madonna painted on a ship’s sail. The tradition holds that each year on July 22, the townspeople row out to the islet and drop stones into the water to maintain it.

Getting Around the Bay

The road around the bay (the coastal road from Kotor through Risan, Perast, and the Verige Strait channel) is beautiful and slow in summer when tourist traffic thickens. The ferry across the Verige Strait (a short crossing that saves 40 kilometres of driving) runs throughout the day. Most visitors base in Kotor and make day trips along the bay.

Practical Notes

Montenegro uses the euro despite not being an EU member. The Tivat airport (TIV) is 8 kilometres from Kotor and receives direct flights from several European cities in summer. Dubrovnik airport in Croatia is 85 kilometres away and has better year-round connections.

The Old Town fills with cruise ship passengers between roughly 9am and 5pm in peak season (July and August). Arriving at the town gates before 8am or after 6pm gives you the medieval streets in something approaching actual scale.