Three days in Kotor: climb above the cruise ships before breakfast

Two nights in a walled Venetian town at the head of the Bay of Kotor, with a fortress wall running straight up the mountain behind it and a baroque island church half an hour up the water.

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Length
3 days, 2 nights
Where you stay
Kotor
Places
7 across 3 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Kotor sits at the far end of a bay that pushes 28 kilometres inland between mountains that fall almost vertically into it. People call it a fjord and it is not one: no glacier cut it, it is a drowned river canyon, and the difference matters mostly because the water is warm enough to swim in.

The town itself is a triangle of stone squeezed between the water and the cliff, entirely walled, with no cars, no street names and about a dozen churches in a space you can cross in six minutes. Above it, a fortification wall zigzags 260 metres straight up the mountainside to a fortress, and the steps up to it are the reason most people come.

Two nights is enough for the town, the climb and the bay, provided you organise the days around two facts. Cruise ships dock right beside the old town from May to October and empty several thousand people into it between nine and five. And the mountain behind the town holds the heat like an oven. Both problems have the same answer: get up early.

Highlights

  • The fortress steps above the town, best climbed at first light and unbearable by ten
  • St Tryphon's cathedral, consecrated in 1166, with two bell towers that do not match
  • A walled old town of squares named after their churches, with more cats than residents
  • A church on a man-made island off Perast, raised on a reef by sailors who kept dropping stones on it
  • The road to Lovcen, twenty five hairpins to a mausoleum at 1,657 metres above the bay

Where to stay

Kotor, two nights

The old town is a walled triangle with four gates, and the mountain serves as its back wall. There are no road names inside; directions work by gate and by square, and every square is named after the church standing in it. You will get lost on the first evening and it will take about ten minutes to stop mattering.

Sleep inside the walls for the atmosphere and the early start on the steps, or in Dobrota, the strip of houses running north along the shore, for quiet, a swim off the rocks and cheaper rooms. Both are fine; the old town gets noisy in summer because the bars are in the squares and the squares are surrounded by bedrooms.

The bay is the point of being here, so use it. Boats run to the islands and the villages from the quay all day, the water is clean, and the best hour of the day is usually the one spent in it.

Day by day

Day 1 in Kotor

Inside the walls: the cathedral, the sailors and the squares

Come in through the main gate from the waterfront and let the town happen for an hour before visiting anything. It is small enough that wandering is efficient: lanes two metres wide, worn stone underfoot, washing overhead, and every so often the lanes open into a square with a church and four restaurant terraces in it.

The cathedral is the oldest and best of them. St Tryphon was consecrated in 1166 on the site of an earlier church built for the saint's relics, which local merchants bought from Venetian traders in the ninth century, and it has been knocked about by earthquakes ever since, most recently in 1979. Its two bell towers are different heights and different designs because the money ran out after the 1667 quake, which is somehow the most Adriatic detail in the town. Inside there is a stone rood screen, medieval frescoes in fragments, and a reliquary chapel upstairs full of silver.

Two minutes away, the maritime museum occupies a baroque palace and explains what this town actually was: not a resort but a serious seafaring republic, with its own navy, a sailors' guild founded in the ninth century and captains who worked for the Russian and Venetian fleets. Model ships, weapons, portraits of men in uniform, and a room of things brought home.

Finish at the Orthodox church on the next square, built in 1909 and still smelling of beeswax, which is a useful reminder that this coast is Catholic and Orthodox in roughly equal measure and always has been.

Eat late. The town is at its best once the last ship has sailed.

  1. 15:30

    St Tryphon's Cathedral

    Religious

    The Catholic cathedral of 1166, with two mismatched bell towers, a stone rood screen and a reliquary chapel upstairs. Small entry fee, and the best building inside the walls.

  2. 16:45

    Maritime Museum

    Culture

    The town's seafaring history in a baroque palace: models, uniforms, weapons and the story of a small port that put captains on other people's navies. About an hour.

  3. 18:00

    St Nicolas Church

    Religious

    The Serbian Orthodox church on its own square, finished in 1909, with a wall of icons and candles burning at the door. Free, and quiet even in August.

  4. 20:30

    Dinner on a square

    Eat

    Fish, squid or black risotto, on whichever square has the fewest tour groups on it. Nine o'clock is a normal time to sit down.

With more time: The small aquarium a short walk north of the walls is a good half hour with children and cool in the afternoon heat, and the cat museum inside the old town costs a euro and takes ten minutes. Neither is essential. The walk north along the shore into Dobrota, with the mountain going straight up on your right, is better than both.

Day 2 in Kotor

The steps at dawn, then the mountain road to the mausoleum

Be at the gate when the ticket booth opens, or before it. The path up to the fortress is roughly 1,350 steps of uneven stone switchbacking up the cliff face behind the town, and it takes most people an hour and a half up and an hour down. In July it is genuinely dangerous by mid morning, with no shade at all on the upper sections; at six or seven it is cool, empty and one of the great walks in the Adriatic.

Halfway up, at the point where you have stopped enjoying it, there is a small church built in 1518 on a terrace with a view straight down onto the roofs of the old town. Sit there. Above it the wall keeps climbing to the fortress of San Giovanni at 260 metres, which is a ruin, roofless and unfenced, and the view from the top takes in the whole inner bay and the mouth of the gorge behind.

Take water, take a hat, and wear shoes with a grip. Coming down is harder on the knees than going up.

Spend the afternoon high. The road out of Kotor to Cetinje climbs the same mountain by twenty five numbered hairpins, and every one of them opens the bay a little further below you. At the top is the national park, and at the highest accessible point of it, up 461 steps, a black granite mausoleum holding Petar II Petrovic-Njegos, prince-bishop of Montenegro, poet, and the man this country still quotes. He died in 1851, the tomb was designed by Ivan Mestrovic and finished in 1974, and the terrace behind it looks over most of Montenegro and, on a good day, into Albania.

The road is narrow, spectacular and no place to be in a hurry. If you are not driving, tours and taxis run up from Kotor for a fixed price.

  1. 06:30

    Climb up inside the Fortress

    Historic

    About 1,350 stone steps zigzagging up the cliff to the fortress at 260 metres. Ninety minutes up, no shade, ticket booth at the gate. Start at first light, or do not start.

  2. 07:30

    Church of Our Lady of Remedy

    Religious

    A small church of 1518 on a terrace halfway up the fortress path, and the natural place to stop and look down on the roofs of the town.

  3. 13:30

    Mausoleum of Njegoš

    Historic

    The tomb of Montenegro's prince-bishop and national poet, at 1,657 metres in the Lovcen national park, up 461 steps from the car park. A granite chamber, a giant seated figure, and a terrace over half the country.

With more time: The same mountain road carries on to Cetinje, the old royal capital, an hour from Kotor: a small town of nineteenth century embassies built when Montenegro had just been recognised as a kingdom, with the palace and the monastery worth an hour between them. Coming back down at sunset is the best part of the whole drive.

Day 3 in Kotor

Perast and the island church, then the bus

Take an early boat or the local bus twelve kilometres up the bay. Perast is a single row of baroque palaces along the water with no room to build behind them, and it was rich enough in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to have its own naval academy while having a population of about a thousand.

Offshore there are two islands. The wooded one is natural, with a Benedictine abbey on it that you cannot land on. The other is not natural at all: sailors began dropping rocks onto a reef in the fifteenth century after an icon of the Virgin was found there, kept doing it for two hundred years, sank captured ships on the spot to hold it together, and built a church on the result. It has a blue dome, a museum room upstairs and a ceiling of paintings, and around the walls hang silver votive plaques left by sailors, plus a piece of embroidery a local woman worked on for twenty five years using her own hair as it turned grey.

Boats out from the Perast waterfront take five minutes and go constantly. Every 22 July the town still rows out at sunset and throws more stones onto the island.

Back in Kotor with time to spare, swim off the rocks north of the walls before the bus.

  1. 09:30

    Our Lady of the Rocks

    Nature

    An artificial island off Perast, built up on a reef over two centuries by sailors dropping stones, with a domed church, votive silver on the walls and an embroidery worked in human hair. Five minutes by boat from the quay.

  2. 12:15

    Coffee on the Perast waterfront

    Eat

    One row of palaces, no through traffic, and the whole bay in front of you. There is nothing to do here and that is the recommendation.

  3. 14:00

    A swim before you go

    Note

    The shore north of the old walls has ladders down into deep clear water. No sand anywhere on this bay, so bring something to sit on.

With more time: With more time on the bay, the flower island off Tivat is a small wooded peninsula with a monastery and a beach on it, twenty minutes south, and the old fortified villages on the far shore are reachable by the car ferry at the narrows. Budva, half an hour down the coast, has a walled old town of its own and the busiest nightlife in Montenegro, which is either a recommendation or a warning.

Before you go

Getting in and getting around

Tivat's airport is 8 km away and handles seasonal flights from across Europe; Dubrovnik, 73 km north over a border that can queue badly in August, has far more of them. Podgorica is 90 km inland. There is no railway to Kotor.

Buses are the way to move around Montenegro. Along the coast they run every half hour or so between Herceg Novi, Kotor and Budva, and hourly inland to Podgorica, with longer services to Dubrovnik, Mostar, Sarajevo and Belgrade. In summer a fast ferry from Dubrovnik takes about three hours and skips the road border entirely, which is worth paying for.

In town you walk, because you have no choice: the old town has no vehicles in it. Leave the car outside the walls, well away from the gates, and read the parking signs carefully. Tow trucks here treat visitors as a business model.

Cruise ships and when to come

The dock is a hundred metres from the main gate, so a large ship changes the character of the town for a day. The rhythm is predictable: quiet before nine, packed from ten to four, and completely different again in the evening when the ships have gone and the squares fill with people having dinner.

June and September are the best months. July and August are hot, expensive and busy; the water is at its warmest in late August. Winter is very quiet, often wet, and the town is beautiful with nobody in it, though the boats to the islands stop running.

Eating, and the cats

The cooking here is Adriatic with a Montenegrin backbone: grilled fish and squid by the water, cured ham and hard cheese from the mountains behind, and a plate of black risotto if the squid ink appeals. Prices on the squares inside the walls are tourist prices; walk five minutes to Dobrota along the shore for the same fish at two thirds of the cost.

The cats are not a marketing exercise. They have lived in the town for centuries, sailors' cats by tradition, they are fed by everybody, and there is a small museum devoted to them. If a cat sits on your chair you have lost the chair.

Kotor rewards early risers more than almost any town on this coast. The steps at dawn, the bay in the middle of the day, the squares after the ships have gone.

Two nights does it properly. Most people give it four hours off a boat, which is why the walls are quiet again by seven.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

Copy to my trips

Common questions

How many days do you need in Kotor?
Two nights. That covers the old town, the fortress climb and one day out on the bay or up the mountain. A third night makes sense if you want both Lovcen and a full day at Perast, or if you plan to swim properly.
How hard is the climb to the fortress?
It is about 1,350 uneven stone steps and 260 metres of ascent, so an hour and a half at a steady pace for anyone reasonably fit. There is no shade and no water on the way. The difficulty is entirely the heat, which is why the answer is always to go at dawn.
Is Kotor ruined by cruise ships?
Not ruined, but transformed for about six hours a day in season. The town before nine and after six is a different and much better place, and a single evening in the squares after the last ship leaves will tell you why people live here.
Kotor or Budva?
Kotor for the town, the walls and the scenery; Budva for beaches, bars and a resort strip. They are half an hour apart, so the sensible answer is to sleep in Kotor and visit Budva if you want a night out.
Do you need a car in Montenegro?
Not for the coast, where buses run frequently and cheaply. A car is worth it for one day if you want Lovcen and Cetinje at your own pace, and it is a liability in Kotor itself, where parking is scarce and towing is aggressive.
Can I move these days around?
Copy the plan and reorder it. The one thing not to move is the climb, which belongs at first light; everything else here works in any order.