Why Montenegro Is the Most Underrated Destination in Europe

The moment we stopped comparing and started paying attention

It was late August, the kind of afternoon that turns the Adriatic copper, and we were sitting on the terrace of a small konoba above the rooftops of Kotor’s old town. Below us, the medieval walls zigzagged up the limestone cliff. A cruise ship — one of the smaller ones — sat anchored in the bay. The waiter brought two glasses of Vranac without being asked and said, simply, “you stay long?” When we said two weeks, he looked satisfied, as though the length of a stay was a measure of intelligence.

That moment distilled everything we had been trying to explain to friends back home: Montenegro is not a consolation prize. It is not “the poor man’s Croatia” or “a backup plan if Dubrovnik is full.” It is its own thing entirely, and right now — before the travel crowd fully catches on — it rewards the curious traveller in ways that very few European countries still can.

What UNESCO recognition actually means here

Montenegro has the Bay of Kotor — the southernmost fjord in Europe, a UNESCO Natural and Cultural-Historical Region that encompasses not just the town of Kotor itself but the entire inland sea carved by tectonic shifts millions of years ago. Stand on the walls above Kotor or cross to the Risan side of the bay and you understand why the designation exists: this is a landscape that feels borrowed from Norway and gifted to the Mediterranean.

But the UNESCO status is not the headline grab it might be elsewhere. Here it just describes reality. The old town within Kotor’s walls has been continuously inhabited since Roman times. The fortified cities of Budva and Bar each carry their own weight of history. Stari Bar — the ruined city perched in the hills behind the coastal resort — is a medieval ghost town few visitors bother to visit, which means you can wander its collapsed archways in near-silence.

Compare that experience to the UNESCO-listed sites further along the Adriatic, where the sheer volume of visitors in summer makes even a genuine historical wonder feel like a theme park. In Montenegro, the heritage is real and the crowds are, for now, manageable.

The raw nature case

Croatia’s Plitvice Lakes are stunning. Slovenia’s Triglav National Park is beautiful. But Montenegro packs a comparable range of landscapes into a country smaller than Connecticut, and the infrastructure of mass tourism has not yet smoothed the edges off.

Durmitor National Park in the north holds a UNESCO designation of its own — a massif of glacial lakes, ancient forests, and karst peaks rising above 2,500 metres. You can ski it in winter and hike it in summer, and the village of Žabljak that serves as its gateway has the atmosphere of a mountain town that still belongs to the people who live there rather than the people who visit.

The Tara Canyon is the deepest river canyon in Europe and the second deepest in the world. When you stand at its rim and look down at the river 1,300 metres below, turning turquoise in the afternoon light, the Grand Canyon comparison is not hyperbole — it is the only frame of reference most people have for that kind of vertical drop. You can raft the upper Tara with outfitters based out of Žabljak, a day that moves between Class III and Class IV rapids depending on snowmelt, and emerges into flat stretches where the canyon walls close in on both sides and the silence is absolute.

Skadar Lake, straddling the border with Albania, is the largest lake in the Balkans and one of the most important bird sanctuaries in Europe. Pelicans nest on its islets. Cormorants work the shallow reeds at dawn. Orthodox monasteries built on rocky outcroppings — Kom, Beška, Starčevo — rise from the water like something from a medieval manuscript. A slow boat day on Skadar is the kind of travel experience that does not photograph well because the atmosphere is the thing, not the image.

The price reality

Let us be honest about money, because it matters. Montenegro uses the euro despite not being in the EU, and it is meaningfully cheaper than Croatia, Italy, or Greece at comparable quality levels. A meal in a good restaurant in Kotor — grilled fish, a salad, local wine, dessert — runs to roughly €25–35 for two people. A konoba lunch above the bay might cost less. Hotel rooms in the mid-range category are 20–40% cheaper than equivalent rooms in Dubrovnik or Split.

This is partly because tourism infrastructure is less developed (which is itself a feature — you encounter fewer of the tourist-trap dynamics that make parts of coastal Croatia feel extractive). It is partly because Montenegro is still building its reputation. The gap between quality and price that existed in Croatia in the early 2000s exists in Montenegro today.

That gap will close. It always does. The question is whether you visit before or after it does.

What the neighbours have that Montenegro does not

Honesty requires acknowledging what Montenegro lacks relative to its more developed neighbours. Transport links are more limited — the Podgorica airport is small, and international connections outside peak season require planning. The coastal road can be brutal in July and August, with slow queues on the switchbacks between Herceg Novi and Kotor. Restaurant English is patchy outside the main tourist centres. And some of the newer resort construction on the Budva Riviera — Bečići, Rafailovići — has the aesthetic of a development that moved faster than its planning.

But these friction points are also the reason the country remains underrated. They filter for a certain kind of traveller. If you can rent a car in Tivat, navigate a two-lane mountain road, and find satisfaction in a lunch place that has no TripAdvisor reviews, Montenegro is already yours.

The few-crowds reality right now

We have been to Dubrovnik three times. The first visit was transformative. The second was crowded. The third, in August, involved a queue to walk the city walls that stretched forty minutes and a waterfront so thick with day-trippers that moving from one end to the other was a test of patience. Dubrovnik remains magnificent but it is no longer serene.

Kotor — which shares Dubrovnik’s medieval walls, comparable Venetian architecture, and a bay setting that arguably exceeds it for drama — receives a fraction of the footfall. In shoulder season, you can walk its streets at 7am and have them almost entirely to yourself. Even in August, the old town empties noticeably after the day-tripper buses leave in the late afternoon.

Join a small-group walking tour of Kotor old town to get your bearings with a local guide — but then lose the group and spend the afternoon wandering the lanes yourself, which is where the real texture of the place lives.

The Perast question is one we return to often. This village of baroque palaces on the inner bay has perhaps 300 permanent residents and almost no commercial infrastructure beyond a handful of restaurants and a boat service to the island church of Our Lady of the Rocks. It is objectively one of the most beautiful villages on the Adriatic. And in shoulder season, you can sit at the water’s edge and watch the bay in something approaching solitude.

Practical reasons to go now

The argument for going soon is not manufactured urgency. The Aman resort at Sveti Stefan — the pink-roofed island hotel visible from the coastal road between Budva and Petrovac — has already put Montenegro on the radar of the luxury travel market. Several high-end properties have opened or are under construction around the Bay of Kotor. The country is in EU accession negotiations. The airport at Tivat, close to the bay, has improved international connections significantly since 2015.

None of this is bad news for Montenegro. But it means the window in which the country has genuine heritage, world-class natural landscapes, and a price-to-quality gap that works strongly in the traveller’s favour is finite.

If you want to explore Kotor without crowds, book a food and wine tour of Kotor old town in May or September rather than August — you will get the experience at its best. Plan a day on Skadar Lake for the birdlife and monasteries. Drive the coastal road south from Kotor to Ulcinj at your own pace. Spend a night in the mountains at Žabljak before returning to the coast.

The case for Montenegro is not complicated. It is that a country this beautiful, this historically layered, this varied in its landscapes — with coastline, canyon, lake, and mountain all within three hours of each other — should by rights be overrun. The fact that it is not is an accident of history, geography, and perception that the careful traveller can still exploit.

We keep coming back. We keep sending people. Almost all of them say the same thing afterward: “Why did I wait so long?” Explore our 7-day first-time itinerary and travel tips for Montenegro before your trip — then go find out for yourself.