The Bay of Kotor

What the bay actually is

A fjord is carved by a glacier grinding a valley into a U and then flooded by the sea. The Boka is a ria: a river valley that was cut by water, then drowned when sea levels rose, so the sea simply reached inland along a course the river had already made. The shape it leaves behind is different in a way you can see from any point on the shore — a series of rounded basins joined by narrows, rather than one long straight trough, and mountains that come down to the water at the same angle they had when the valley was dry.

That angle is the whole story. The limestone wall behind Kotor rises well over a thousand metres within a couple of kilometres of the quay, and it does not stop at the waterline; it keeps going down. The bay is deep close in, and the shore mostly drops rather than shelves. This is why the Boka photographs like nowhere else on the Adriatic, and it is also why the thing most visitors assume they will do here is the one thing it is bad at.

The bay is not where you swim

People book Kotor for a week expecting a beach holiday and find a town with almost no beach. What shoreline there is tends to be narrow, stony and backed immediately by the coast road, and the water — enclosed, deep, fed by cold karst springs coming up through the floor of the bay — stays noticeably cooler than the open sea a short distance away. Swimming happens, off ladders and small platforms and the occasional imported strip of sand, but it is incidental rather than the point.

The open Adriatic is forty minutes away over the ridge, and that is where the sand is: the Budva Riviera exists for exactly the holiday the bay cannot provide. The efficient version of a Montenegrin coast trip treats them as two different places with two different purposes rather than trying to make one do both — base in the bay for walking, boats and old towns, and go over the hill for the beach days.

Kotor runs on a ship's timetable

Kotor's old town is a compact triangle of marble lanes, small squares and Venetian stonework wedged between the water and the mountain — and the resident cats, which have become the town's unofficial emblem and have a small museum to prove it — and it is small enough that a single large cruise ship changes its character completely. In season the town belongs to ship passengers through the middle of the day and returns to something like itself before and after. Nothing about this is hidden — the ships are visible in the bay from a long way off — but it is rarely built into an itinerary, and it should be.

The practical consequence is that Kotor rewards staying overnight far more than visiting for the day, because the two best hours are the ones a day-tripper is never there for. Early morning gets you the lanes empty and the light coming over the eastern wall; evening gets you the town in use by the people who live in it. If you are only passing through, arrive late rather than early.

The ladder of Kotor is the other reason to be up early. The fortifications climb the cliff behind the town in a long switchback to the fortress of San Giovanni, roughly 1,350 steps and about ninety minutes for the round trip, with the bay opening further below you at every turn. There is essentially no shade on the way up, the stone holds heat, and the same climb that is a pleasure at seven in the morning is punishing at noon in summer.

Perast and the island that was built by hand

At the far end, where the bay opens to the sea, Herceg Novi climbs the slope in stairways and terraces under bougainvillea — a town built vertically because there was no other option, with a fortress at the top and the outer bay below. It is the warmest corner of the Boka and the first or last thing most people see of it, since the north-western border is a short drive beyond.

Twenty minutes along the shore, Perast is what Kotor would be without the ships: a single row of baroque stone houses and an improbable number of churches facing the water, with the through-road diverted so the waterfront stays quiet. It is small enough to walk end to end in fifteen minutes and pleasant enough that people do it several times.

Offshore sit two islets, and one of them is not natural. Our Lady of the Rocks was made by people — the story is that it began with a rock where an icon was found, and grew over centuries as sailors dropped stones there on returning safely. The practice survives as an annual boat procession in which the town rows out at dusk and adds to the island, which is a rare thing: a piece of local religious tradition that is still doing the job it was invented for rather than being performed for visitors. A short boat crossing from the Perast waterfront gets you to the church and its museum.