From Dubrovnik: Perast, Kotor & Budva – Montenegro's Three Fortified Towns

Head south from Dubrovnik along the Adriatic coast, crossing from Croatia into Montenegro at the Debeli Brijeg border crossing. The guide introduces the unique political history of the Bay of Kotor — a landlocked sea enclosed by mountains that made it one of the most defensible harbours in the Mediterranean and one of the most fought-over. The Venetian Republic controlled these shores for 400 years; their fortification programme created the walled cities visible today.

Perast is a Baroque village so small — a single main street, 17 churches, perhaps 400 inhabitants at its peak — that it feels like a stage set. Yet it was one of the most important maritime communities in the Adriatic in the 17th and 18th centuries: Perast sea-captains trained the first Russian naval officers for Peter the Great, and the town's merchants built the palaces and churches still visible along the waterfront. Just offshore, two tiny islands float in the bay: Sveti Đorđe (St George Island, a medieval Benedictine monastery) and Gospa od Škrpjela (Our Lady of the Rocks), a manmade island created by Perast sailors who — by local custom — threw a stone and a votive offering into the sea each 22 July for 400 years, gradually building up a reef on which the church now stands.

Kotor's old town is enclosed by 4.5 kilometres of walls — the longest and highest medieval defensive system in the Adriatic. The walls begin at sea level, run along the waterfront for 600 metres, then climb steeply up the mountain to the Fortress of San Giovanni at 280 metres, enclosing the entire slope in a triangle of towers, bastions and curtain walls. Within the walls, the medieval city is extraordinarily intact: the Cathedral of Saint Tryphon (12th century Romanesque, built by the seafarers of Kotor), the Church of Saint Luke (1195, one of the oldest in the Adriatic), Byzantine palaces, Venetian loggias and a maze of marble streets. The guide covers the 1538 Ottoman siege that failed when the Venetians held the walls, and the 1979 earthquake that destroyed 70% of the buildings — rebuilt stone by stone using the original materials.

Budva's old town occupies a small peninsula jutting into the Adriatic — a naturally defensible promontory that has been fortified for 2,500 years. The Venetian citadel at the southern tip of the peninsula is the most visually dramatic: its walls dropping directly into the sea, its towers surveying both the bay and the open Adriatic. The old town streets within the walls are Venetian in character — marble pavements, church facades, narrow alleys opening onto small piazzas. The guide covers the town's extraordinary history: a Greek colony from the 5th century BC, a Roman city, a Byzantine fortress, a Venetian possession from 1443, briefly Napoleonic, then Austrian, then Yugoslav, and finally Montenegrin.