Climbing the ladder of Kotor before sunrise: 1,350 steps and a view worth every one

The alarm goes off at 4:45am

The room is dark and the old town is quiet — genuinely quiet, the kind of silence that only exists between 2am and 5am in a place that is busy by day. I dress in layers, fill my water bottle, and slip out of the apartment into a lane that has absorbed 700 years of footsteps. My own feel too loud.

The climb starts at the northern end of Kotor’s old town, through the gate near the Church of Our Lady of Remedy. There is a sign with the opening hours — the walls officially open at 8am in the off-season, earlier in summer — but in April, in the dark, the gate is unlocked. I later learn this is deliberate: the caretaker opens it for the sunrise climbers. There is an honesty box for the ticket price (€8). I leave a note.

The first hundred steps are easy. The path is well-maintained, the stones fitted in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by Venetian stonemasons who understood that a fortification was only as good as its approach. The walls here are chest-height on either side, and the city below is a geometry of terracotta roofs and dark lanes, church towers lit from below by the street lights.

The fortifications as architecture

The walls of Kotor stretch roughly 4.5 kilometres in total, incorporating towers, bastions, and the fortress of San Giovanni at the summit. They were built in stages — Byzantine foundations, Venetian construction, later Ottoman siege damage repaired by whoever controlled the town at a given moment — and the variety in the stone and the masonry technique is visible if you look carefully. Some sections are a deep rose-coloured limestone. Others are pale grey, almost white, and the joints between blocks are wide enough to suggest hasty construction during a siege.

Around step 300, the path narrows and the wall drops away to the left, revealing the first real views down to the bay. The water is still dark — pre-dawn, the kind of darkness that is more texture than colour — but the lights of the villages on the far shore trace the contour of the inner bay precisely. Perast is visible as a cluster of warm light. Above it, the black mass of the mountains.

I stop here longer than I intend to. The stillness is remarkable. Somewhere below, a dog starts and stops barking. The town breathes.

The middle section

Steps 400 to 900 are where the climb becomes genuinely demanding. The angle increases. The path is still stone-flagged but narrower, and in places the fortification wall has partially collapsed, creating a rubble-field that requires some picking of steps. In wet weather, this section would be treacherous — the limestone polishes to a near-frictionless surface. In April, after a dry week, it is fine.

There are two small churches embedded in the walls at different heights — Santa Maria Remedy and an earlier structure whose dedication has been lost. Both are locked, but the small courtyards in front of them serve as natural rest points, and from each one the view changes significantly as you climb. The old town below begins to reveal its plan — the grid of main streets, the open square in front of the cathedral, the dark ribbon of the canal.

At around step 700, the sky begins to lighten in the east. I am roughly two-thirds of the way up, standing on a section of wall that juts outward to form a bastion. The Lovćen massif, which rises behind Kotor to nearly 1,750 metres, catches the first colour before anything else: a line of salmon-pink at the peak that holds for perhaps four minutes before the whole ridge ignites.

I have been to sunrise viewpoints on four continents. I am not being hyperbolic when I say that the next twenty minutes are among the most visually extraordinary I have spent outdoors.

San Giovanni at dawn

The fortress at the top — the Castle of Saint John, or Tvrđava Sveti Ivan — is a ruin, its interior spaces open to the sky, its walls intact but roofless. In its heyday it was a complete defensive system, housing a garrison capable of defending the town from any assault that reached this height. The walls are thick enough to walk along, and I do, following the southern face of the fortress to a point where the entire bay is visible in a single sweep.

The sun has cleared the ridge. The bay is an intense blue-green now, lit from the east, and the peninsula of Lustica beyond Tivat glows orange along its far shore. The cruise ships — two of them, anchored in the outer bay near Tivat — catch the light and throw it back. Kotor’s old town directly below is a perfect miniature, its streets laid out like a board game, the cathedral square already catching direct light while the surrounding lanes remain in shadow.

I spend an hour up here. Two other couples arrive — both clearly also early risers who planned this — and we nod to each other in the way that people who share an early morning somewhere special tend to do. There is not much to say. The view says it.

Practical details for the climb

When to go: April through October for sunrise. In shoulder season (April, May, September, October), the light arrives between 5:45am and 6:30am. Summer (June–August) means very early alarms but also the longest golden-hour windows. Winter is possible on clear days but the walls can be icy.

What to wear: Layers. The old town can be warm in the evening but the fortress is several hundred metres above sea level and wind-exposed. A light windproof is essential. Proper footwear is non-negotiable — leather-soled shoes or flip-flops on that polished limestone is a bad idea.

Water: Bring at least one litre. There is nowhere to buy water on the climb. The round trip takes 90 minutes to two hours depending on pace.

Tickets: The walls are ticketed during official hours. In the very early morning, the honesty box system operates. The current price is around €8 per person.

Going alone vs with a guide: For the walls specifically, I prefer going solo — the experience is introspective, meditative. If you want to understand the history of the fortifications and the town below, join a small-group walking tour of Kotor for your first day, then do the walls independently at sunrise afterward. The history will layer onto what you see.

Cable car alternative: The Kotor cable car now runs from the old town up to the Lovćen foothills, offering views over the bay without the stair climb. It is spectacular in its own right. But it is not the same as earning the view on foot.

Coming down

Descending is faster but harder on the knees. The steps are steep enough that you cannot simply stride down — you pick your footing, using the wall for balance on the narrower sections. Give yourself at least forty-five minutes.

By the time I reach the gate, the old town is waking. The bakery near the square is open — I can smell the bread from the lane. A delivery truck is attempting, with limited success, to navigate a street that was not designed for motor vehicles. The cats, which have multiplied overnight as they always seem to in Kotor’s old town, are arranged in their usual positions on every warm stone surface.

I eat breakfast at a table by the south gate, watching the cruise passengers begin to trickle in from the port. They are cheerful and organised and carrying good cameras. They will see Kotor beautifully and efficiently. But they will not see it the way I just did: from 280 metres up, in the first light, with the bay laid out below and nothing moving but the shifting colour of the water.

For a fuller exploration of the bay from the water, consider booking a Blue Cave and Lady of the Rocks boat tour — the contrast between the high aerial view from the walls and the water-level perspective is one of Kotor’s great experiences. And if you are planning more time in the mountains, our Durmitor hiking guide covers the very different terrain of Montenegro’s interior.

Why the walls should be the first thing you do in Kotor

Every itinerary for the Bay of Kotor puts the walls somewhere. The honest advice is to put them first — not as a box-ticking exercise but because the view from San Giovanni reshapes everything you see afterward at ground level. When you have stood above the town and understood its geography — the relationship between the walls and the cliff, the way the lanes are laid out below, the position of the bay relative to the Verige narrows — the subsequent walk through the old town has a different quality. You are moving through a landscape you have already understood from above.

The city walls are also, if you do them at sunrise, the place where you understand why Kotor has been continuously inhabited for two millennia. The site makes no sense unless you have been to the height of it: the fortress controls the entire bay, the town below is protected on three sides by mountains and on the fourth by the water, and the city walls are simply the logical expression of the site’s natural defensibility. From San Giovanni at dawn, the whole thing is self-explanatory in a way that a history book cannot quite achieve.

Come back down. Have coffee. Then let the rest of Kotor happen. The day will feel different for having started this way — and the 7-day first-time itinerary that we recommend for first-time visitors is built around exactly this kind of morning, when the best experience is available to those who set the alarm.