The Bay That Isn't a Fjord

The Bay of Kotor gets called Europe's southernmost fjord in roughly every article written about it, and it is not one. A fjord is glacial. This is a ria — a river canyon that flooded when the sea came up — which is geologically duller and visually identical: four connected basins winding twenty-eight kilometres inland, walls of grey limestone going up to 1,700 metres, and the water dead flat and dark green.

Kotor itself is at the far end, jammed into the only flat ground available, with a triangle of fortification climbing the cliff behind it that looks, from across the water, like a diagram of ambition.

Eleven hours on a bus, and everyone was right

The Ljubljana–Kotor bus is €54 and takes eleven hours through Croatia and Bosnia and along the Adriatic coast road. It has no working air conditioning in the back third, two twenty-minute stops, and a driver who takes the Montenegrin corniche at a speed that makes the whole vehicle lean.

It is also the best value on this entire trip. You sit above the sea for four straight hours watching islands go past, through six different limestone landscapes, past inlets with two houses and a church each. Twice we crossed borders where a guard boarded and looked at passports without much interest. I did not read a page of my book.

The cruise arithmetic

Kotor takes cruise ships. On the days one is in, roughly four thousand people come through a walled old town of about a thousand permanent residents, between approximately 09:00 and 16:30. On days when none is in, it is a quiet Montenegrin town with laundry across the alleys and cats asleep on the fortification stones.

You can look up the schedule. Do. It is a public port calendar and it determines everything about your day: whether the old town is a stage set or a place, whether lunch is €22 or €9, whether you can hear the bells.

My routine after the first few days: walls or water in the early morning, retreat across the bay to Muo for the middle of the day, and return at 17:30 as the ships pulled out and the town exhaled.

Twelve nights in the same room, watching the same water, is not a holiday. Around day six it turns into something closer to living somewhere.

1,350 steps

The walls run from the old town up to the fortress of San Giovanni at 260 metres, and the route is 1,350 uneven limestone steps with no shade. In late July the surface temperature on those stones by 10am is genuinely dangerous. The ticket is €15 and the gate opens early; I went at 06:15 twice and had it almost to myself with the bay in shadow and the light coming over the ridge.

Above the fortress a path continues out of the walls entirely, through a hole in the masonry, up to the village of Špiljari and eventually onto the Ladder of Cattaro — the old zigzag mule track with about seventy switchbacks that was the only land route inland before the road. I did four hours of it and turned around, which was the right call at that temperature and still felt like giving up.

Swimming, and where

There is essentially no beach in Kotor. What there is instead: concrete platforms and ladders along the road in Muo, Prčanj and Dobrota, where the bay is eight metres deep two metres from the edge and the water sits around 25°C in August. You swim off a ladder in front of somebody's house, next to somebody's boat. It is better than a beach.

The salt-water spring at Ljuta comes out of the cliff cold enough to change the temperature of the bay in patches, so you can swim through a band of 17°C water without warning and lose the ability to breathe properly for a second.

Twelve nights. North from here, and the geography turns inland for the first time since February.