Montenegro Travel Guide: Overview

Within a surface area of less than 14,000 sq km (5,405 sq miles) – that’s just two thirds the size of Wales – it contains a huge amount that is worth seeing, from beautifully preserved medieval towns to dizzying mountains. And despite only having gained its independence in 2006, its history is fantastically rich, with Montenegro lying on a fault line between east and west and having been washed over by some two and a half millennia of successive empires and invaders – from Greeks and Romans to Venetians, Ottomans and Austrians, to name just a few.

Heritage sites

Montenegro’s Adriatic coast is dotted with a succession of magnificent heritage sites – nowhere more so than the stunningly beautiful Bay of Kotor, a steep-sided inlet surrounded by mountains, its mouth so narrow that it was once spanned by a huge chain. At one end of this bay, the walled, medieval city of Kotor is a Unesco World Heritage Site, a fascinating warren of streets and alleys, its defensive walls more than twice the length of those at Dubrovnik. Further around the Bay of Kotor, two tiny jewel-like islands stand offshore, one of them created artificially by locals dropping rocks into the sea to create a platform on which to build a church – to which one evening a year they still come in a ritual procession, aboard brightly decorated fishing boats. 

Further south along the coast, the old towns of Budva and Ulcinj cling to rocky promontories, their fortified walls emerging out of the crashing waves, while the diminutive cluster of houses that is Sveti Stefan has been developed from a humble fishing village into one of the most exclusive resorts on the Adriatic. Exquisite Roman mosaic flooring can be seen in Risan. Both on the coast and inland, there are some beautiful monasteries – among them the Morača Monastery with its exceptional frescoes in the Raška Style, and Ostrog, its white façade seeming to emerge from a sheer cliff. Excellent vineyards carpet the hills west of Lake Skadar and ancient olive trees scatter the landscape around Stari Bar in their thousands, some of them older than the time of Christ, having outlived all and any of the empires which have followed since.

Montenegro has two Unesco World Heritage Sites: the beautifully well-preserved, walled medieval city of Kotor and its surroundings on the Bay of Kotor; and inland, the magnificent, unspoiled wilderness of Durmitor and the Tara Canyon. Several other properties have been submitted to the list, including Stari Bar, the historic core of Cetinje and Biogradska Gora National Park. Watch this space.

River deep, mountain high

Whatever the beauty of its coast, it is the wildly untamed and dramatic landscape of its hinterland – its spectacular mountains, stupendously deep canyons, vast lakes and jewel-like mountain tarns, which are arguably Montenegro’s greatest, most unforgettable asset – from the unspoiled virgin forest of Biogradska Gora and the huge mountain plateau of Durmitor to the sprawling watery wilderness of Lake Skadar, and the spectacular and remote mountains of the Albanian border. 

This landscape makes Montenegro a fantastic destination for hiking, mountain biking, kayaking and white water rafting – perhaps nowhere more so than in its five national parks, Durmitor, Biogradska Gora, Lake Skadar, Prokletije and Lovćen. All have distinctive features. Across the edge of the Durmitor plateau, the river Tara has carved a phenomenally deep canyon – at 1,300 metres (4,265ft), the deepest in Europe. Lake Skadar is the largest lake in the Balkans, looking at times like a slightly less vertiginous version of China’s Guilin. The summit of Mt Lovćen is topped with the mausoleum of Montenegro’s great 19^th century ruler poet, Petar II Petrović-Njegoš. Prokletije (meaning the ‘accursed mountains’) is Montenegro’s most newly created national park, a breathtaking succession of peaks along the border with Albania. Montenegro is a karst landscape, and halfway along the shore of the Bay of Kotor, the largest submarine spring on the Adriatic coast bursts out of a sheer cliff by the roadside and shoots down into the sea.

Montenegro’s wild and rugged landscape and national parks are home to an extraordinary wealth of wildlife and plants. Brown bear and wolves inhabit remote mountain areas, though in small numbers and they’re extremely wary of allowing themselves to be seen by humans (who tend to shoot them). More common mammals include the red and roe deer, fox and wild boar, while the country is home to a whole host of reptiles and amphibians, including the Balkan green lizard, nose-horned viper and four-lined snake. The number of butterflies is astonishing. Birdlife is at its richest on Lake Skadar (a Ramsar site) and Ulcinj Saltpans, where you can see Dalmatian pelicans, pygmy cormorants, great crested grebes and little egrets, along with many other species. Plant life is equally rich, from tall stands of black mountain pine alongside the Tara Canyon to a plethora of flowers, many of them rare or endemic. 

When Sir J Gardner Wilkinson wrote of his travels in Montenegro in 1848, he stated: ‘The general aspect of Montenegro is that of a succession of elevated ridges, diversified here and there by a lofty mountain peak, and, in some parts, looking like a sea of immense waves turned into stone.’ It’s a sketch which still rings surprisingly true today.

On 15 April 1979 a massive earthquake struck just off the Montenegrin coast, causing widespread destruction across the country and leaving some 80,000 Montenegrins homeless. This was not the first major earthquake to hit Montenegro – the great earthquake of 1667 also did considerable damage.

Independent Montenegro

Montenegro held a referendum and voted to become independent from Serbia in 2006. Much has changed in the years since that date, both in domestic politics and on the international stage. Since independence Montenegro has joined the UN (2006), been admitted into the IMF and World Bank (2007), its citizens have been granted visa-free travel within the Schengen zone (2009), and it has attained formal candidacy for EU membership (2010). Montenegro was invited to join NATO in 2015. Montenegrin politics have been dominated by Milo Đukanović since 1991 and he has been the country’s prime minister since 2012. 

At home, the overall number of tourist arrivals continues to rise steadily, with almost 90 percent of these being foreign visitors. The number of cruise ships visiting Montenegro more than doubled between 2007 and 2013, with the total number of cruise passengers multiplying by more than six times over the same period. New property developments such as Porto Montenegro and the arrival of direct routes to the UK and elsewhere in Europe with budget airlines (Ryanair opened routes to Podgorica from London and Brussels in 2013 and 2014, Easyjet began flying to Tivat from London and Manchester in 2016) are sure indicators that Montenegro is continuing to grow as a tourist destination. Still, most of this growth in tourism continues to be along the coast – head inland and only slightly off the beaten track, and you can still find yourself in places which feel like somewhere time forgot.