Kotor
"Kotor's walls climb the mountain above it as if the city wanted to make absolutely sure it was safe."
The ferry from Lepetane drops you at Kamenari and saves you the long drive around the bay. I remember standing at the bow as the boat crossed, watching Kotor materialise from the grey-green water — not a city announcing itself, but one that had simply been there for so long it had become indistinguishable from the mountain behind it. The walls follow the ridgeline up to the ruined Fortress of San Giovanni at 280 metres. Someone built all of that by hand.
Inside the Walls
The old town closes in fast. Trg od Oružja — the Square of Arms — opens up just past the main gate, wide and sun-bleached in the afternoon, then the lanes thin to a metre or two and the light goes cool and medieval. There are eleven churches crammed inside these walls, which is frankly too many churches, but the Cathedral of Saint Tryphon on Trg Sv. Tripuna earns its prominence. I stood in there for twenty minutes looking at the 12th-century ciborium and the faint Byzantine frescoes above the altar while Lia sat outside with a coffee and what she called “a reasonable quantity of burek” from a bakery on Ulica Pima.
The burek deserves a note. Montenegro’s version is fat and oily in exactly the right way, the pastry shatteringly crisp. We ate it for breakfast twice.
The Climb and the Cat Economy
I did not expect to spend forty minutes photographing cats. Kotor has somewhere between a hundred and several hundred cats living openly inside the walls — there is a whole small museum dedicated to them on Ulica Marka Martinovića — and they treat the ancient stonework as furniture, which it basically is. One orange tom had posted himself on a Roman-era fragment of column near the Sea Gate as if this were perfectly ordinary. It is, apparently, perfectly ordinary.
The climb to San Giovanni takes about an hour from the north gate. Somewhere past the 200-step marker, the city stops being a labyrinth and becomes a map. The bay opens up in both directions, the water so still it doubles the mountains on the far shore. I did not expect quiet up there. I found it anyway.
The Bay Beyond
Kotor is the jewel, but the bay rewards a half-day circuit. Perast — twelve minutes north along the shore road — is a single street of baroque palaces facing two small islands, one of which holds the church of Our Lady of the Rocks, built on a reef that fishermen gradually expanded over centuries by sinking old ships and stones. The whole thing is either deeply impractical or deeply romantic, depending on your temperament.
When to go: May and early June offer warm, clear days before the summer crowds arrive — the lanes inside the walls can become genuinely impassable in July and August. Late September is equally lovely and noticeably calmer.