Herceg Novi: Montenegro's gateway from the sea

Anyone entering Montenegro by road from Croatia does so through Herceg Novi. The city sits at the point where the Bay of Kotor opens onto the open Adriatic, at the western end of that extraordinary geological formation that medieval navigators called Bocche di Cattaro and that modern cartographers classify as the only fjord in the Mediterranean. Before the bay closes on itself and the mountains become more vertical and darker, there is Herceg Novi: the threshold.

The city has a quality of gateway that goes beyond geography. Arriving from the Croatian Dalmatian coast — Dubrovnik is forty kilometres away — you notice immediately that something has changed. Signs are in Cyrillic as well as Roman script. Prices are a little lower. The architecture — which also has Venetian and Mediterranean layers — has a different accent, a proportion that is not quite that of Dalmatian towns. Herceg Novi is the first signal that you have crossed a border that is not only administrative.

The layers of a city in transit

Herceg Novi was founded in 1382 by the Bosnian king Stjepan Vukčić Kosača — the same man whose title “herzeg” (duke) gave the city its name and eventually gave its name to the region of Herzegovina. The choice of location was strategic: controlling access to the bay meant controlling the trade flowing in and out of the Balkan interior.

The powers that fought over the city across the centuries each left their mark. The Ottomans took Herceg Novi in 1482 and held it for nearly two centuries, building mosques and bathhouses that no longer exist but whose urban logic remains readable in the fabric of the old town. The Venetians took it in 1687, as part of the great offensive that also gave them Greece and Dalmatia during the Morean War, and built their own fortresses over the Ottoman foundations. The Austro-Hungarians, who took control in 1814 after the Napoleonic wars, added the Central European veneer — the promenade, the neoclassical buildings, the staircases — that today defines the image of the lower city.

Kanli Kula fortress

The Kanli Kula fortress, high above the city, is the most visible of the defensive structures surrounding Herceg Novi. Its name, in Turkish, means “bloody tower”, which gives a sense of its use during the centuries of Ottoman control: it was a prison and place of execution. The Ottomans built it in the sixteenth century on a promontory dominating both the bay and the entrance to the Adriatic.

Today the fortress is an open-air amphitheatre where concerts and festivals are held during summer. This repurposing — which in another context might seem a trivialisation — works here surprisingly well: the stands, built within the walls in the 1970s, have reasonable acoustics, and attending a concert with the Adriatic as backdrop through sixteenth-century battlements has a quality that conventional auditoriums cannot offer. Entry to the grounds outside events is around two euros.

The Spanish fort and the wisteria

There is a historical curiosity about Herceg Novi that few people know: the city came briefly under Spanish control in the late sixteenth century. Philip II’s Spanish Monarchy took it in 1538 in the context of the Mediterranean wars against the Ottoman Empire, and held it for some years before ceding it again. Structures from that period survive that local historians identify as the “Spanish fort”, though the attribution is not unanimous among specialists. What is certain is that this episode reflects how thoroughly the Bay of Kotor was coveted by every Mediterranean power for centuries.

The wisteria of Herceg Novi is an entirely different matter but equally unavoidable. In April, the city is covered in violet clusters of wisteria hanging from gardens and terraces down to the promenade. The Wisteria Festival — the city organises a specific event — attracts visitors who come purely for this botanical spectacle. There is something both absurd and completely logical about building a festival around a climbing plant, and Herceg Novi carries it with the dignity of a place that knows its attractions do not need to be monumental to be real.

The promenade and the city as a base

Herceg Novi’s seafront promenade — the Šetalište — is one of the pleasantest in the bay. It runs parallel to the water for several kilometres, with café terraces on one side and views across the Adriatic on the other. On summer mornings, before the heat arrives, it has the quality of Mediterranean seafronts that have not been entirely taken over by tourism: locals walking, a fresh fruit market, fishing boats tied to the quay.

Herceg Novi works well as a base for exploring the western end of the bay: Savina Monastery (seventeenth-eighteenth centuries) is two kilometres away. The ferry crossing the bay’s mouth — the Verige passage — departs from Kamenari, a few kilometres along the road. The city has sufficient accommodation and restaurants to stay for several days without needing to move, but is also within reasonable distance of Kotor (forty-five kilometres along the northern shore) and the Croatian border.

The complete Far Guides Montenegro guide includes detailed routes, interactive maps and all the practical information you need to plan your independent trip.