Sveti Stefan

Lia and I saw it first from a bend in the coastal road above Budva, and I actually pulled the car over. Sveti Stefan doesn’t look real from up there — this tiny knot of terracotta roofs and stone walls sitting on its own islet, tied to the mainland by nothing but a narrow strip of sand. I’d read that fishing families fortified the place back in the 15th century, walling themselves in against pirates, and standing on that ridge I finally got it: you’d want walls too, if you’d built your whole life on something this exposed and this beautiful.

We didn’t stay on the islet itself — that’s the Aman resort now, and a night there costs more than our monthly rent in Mexico — but we walked the isthmus at golden hour, right up to the gate where the public path ends. The stone houses have been restored since Yugoslavia’s socialist government converted the whole village into a hotel complex in the 1950s, and there’s something strange about knowing Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor once wandered these same narrow lanes. It sat abandoned and crumbling for years after the Yugoslav wars, which is hard to picture now that it’s polished back to postcard condition.

What I loved most wasn’t the islet itself but the view back toward Budva’s old town across the water — we found a rocky patch of beach on the mainland side, ordered grilled squid and a bottle of local wine from a shack with plastic chairs, and just watched the light change on those Adriatic rooftops for two hours. There’s a tiny 15th-century church up on the islet too, barely visible from where we sat, a reminder that this place was a real fishing village long before it became a resort brochure.

When to go: Come between June and September, when the Adriatic is warm enough to swim and the mainland beaches around the isthmus give you the best views of the islet without needing an Aman-sized budget.