Montenegro is an hour wide.
Which boat actually gets inside the Blue Cave. Whether Ostrog is worth the switchbacks. What a wooden boat on Skadar costs. Every tour in the country, reviewed and ranked.
The Bay of Kotor, then everything behind it.
The cave, the island church at Perast, the wooden boats on Skadar, the road up Lovcen and the canyon country in the north. Six places most Montenegro trips are planned around, and the best way to book each.
What Montenegro actually books.
Every review →The tours more travellers take than anything else in the country — including the coach days that cross a border to get here.
1
From Dubrovnik: Montenegro Day Trip
Dubrovnik to Montenegro in 11 hours: Perast and Kotor, bay scenery, optional Our Lady of the Rocks boat, A/C ride for $70.
From · $70
Read our review →
2
From Dubrovnik: Montenegro Boat Tour from Perast to Kotor
from $68
3
Swim in the Blue Cave + Lady of the Rocks Tour
from $53
4
Blue Cave, Submarine Base and Lady of the Rocks Tour
from $53
5
Blue Cave Swim Stop, Lady of the Rocks & Submarine Base
from $39
6
Skadar Lake National Park: Guided Boat Tour to Kom Monastery
from $37
7
From Dubrovnik: Montenegro Day Trip with Boat Cruise
from $62
8
Boat to Blue Cave & Lady of the Rocks &Submarine Base
from $32
Which boat gets you into the Blue Cave.
All 114 Blue Cave tours →
Nearly every boat leaving Kotor runs the same line: Perast, the island church, the cave, a swim off Lustica. What changes is the hull under you and how long you are out for.
Out at nine, cave by ten, back for lunch
The run almost everyone takes. The island church off Perast on the way out, twenty minutes inside the cave, then a swim in water that goes electric under the arch.
Open hull, a dozen seats, first in
A small open boat crosses the bay at speed and slips through the low entrance while the bigger hulls wait outside. Wetter, louder, and inside before the fleet arrives.
Eight hours, a lunch stop, the far side of Boka
The long version keeps going past the narrows towards Herceg Novi and back, with a swim stop and a proper sit-down lunch. Worth it if the bay is the reason you came.
Kotor is a fjord town that never had a glacier.
Four and a half kilometres of Venetian wall climb straight up the mountain behind a town you can cross in ten minutes. Everything on the water leaves from here, and the 1,350 steps to the fortress are a job for before eight in the morning.
The Bay of Kotor is cheaper than it looks.
Every tour on the site, sorted by what it actually costs. The standard bay boat is still the cheapest big day out in the country.
The standard three-hour bay boat, cave-ticket runs, the cable car and an afternoon of wine. The cheapest real day out here.
Where most of Montenegro sits: full-day Boka cruises, the Skadar wooden boats, Ostrog and the north by coach.
Smaller groups, rafting with the jeep transfer in, canyoning with the kit included, and the long loop over Lovcen.
Private drivers, chartered boats and days built around one family instead of a bus.
Montenegro: an island made of stones, a monastery in a cliff, a canyon called The Unseen.
Boat days and mountain roads you can find all the way up the Adriatic. These three you cannot.
Our Lady of the Rocks
The islet is artificial. Sailors found an icon on a rock here in 1452 and began dropping a stone every time they came home safely; two centuries of ballast and scuttled hulls later there was enough ground to build a church on. They still do it — every 22 July the boats go out after sunset and throw stones over the side. Inside, the ceiling carries 68 paintings and the walls thousands of silver votive plaques left by crews who made it back.
- 1Swim in the Blue Cave + Lady of the Rocks Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 3,462 reviews
- 2Blue Cave, Submarine Base and Lady of the Rocks Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 2,869 reviews
- 3Blue Cave Swim Stop, Lady of the Rocks & Submarine Base★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,914 reviews
Ostrog
The upper monastery is set into a vertical rock face 900 metres up, its white front flush with the stone so it looks poured into the mountain rather than built on it. It grew in the 1660s around the cave where Saint Basil lived, and it is the busiest pilgrimage site in the Balkans — Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim visitors all come. Some walk the last three kilometres up from the lower monastery barefoot.
- 1North Montenegro, Durmitor, Tara & Ostrog Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 413 reviews
- 2Ostrog Monastery tour★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 32 reviews
- 3Podgorica Highlights, Ostrog and Zeta nature park day trip★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 24 reviews
Nevidio
Nevidio means unseen, and it earned the name: the Komarnica gorge narrows to under a metre in places and defeated everyone who tried it until a team from Niksic finally got through in 1965 — the last canyon in the country to be entered. It opens for roughly ten weeks a year, once the meltwater drops enough to let anyone in, and you swim, jump and abseil the entire way down.
- 1Nevidio Canyoning★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 90 reviews
- 2Canyoning Skurda River – Extreme adventure in Kotor City★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 40 reviews
- 3Canyoning in Nevidio Canyon★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 18 reviews
Skadar is the biggest lake in the Balkans, and a third of it is Albania.
Flat-bottomed wooden boats push out of Virpazar through the lily fields, past Kom monastery and the fortresses the water half-swallowed, into pelican country. It is an hour from the coast and nothing like it.
The two most-booked days in Montenegro start in another country.
All cross-border day trips →Dubrovnik is ninety minutes up the coast in Croatia, Tirana four hours south in Albania, and coaches run both ways. The frontier is part of the day — passports out, twice, and a queue in August.
From Dubrovnik: Montenegro Boat Tour from Perast to Kotor
Read our review →From Dubrovnik: Montenegro Day Trip with Boat Cruise
Read our review →From Dubrovnik: Perast, Kotor & Budva Small-Group Day Trip
Read our review →Above the Tara bridge, Montenegro stops being a coastline.
The Durmitor plateau sits at fifteen hundred metres with eighteen glacial lakes scattered over it, and next door the Tara has cut thirteen hundred metres down through the limestone — the deepest river canyon in Europe. Rafting runs from the spring melt to September; the rest of it is a long driving day and worth every hour of it.
- 1North Montenegro, Durmitor, Tara & Ostrog Tourfrom $95
- 2Tara River Rafting Trip with Jeep Transferfrom $101
- 3Durmitor – Black Lake & Tara River Canyon – North Montenegro tourfrom $301
Crkvice, in the hills above Kotor, is the wettest place in Europe.
The bay traps weather against the mountain wall: Crkvice has recorded five metres of rain in a single year, and the coast takes most of its own between October and April, in bursts rather than drizzle. When it sets in, go underground or inland — the show caves, Ostrog, the old capital at Cetinje, and a long lunch over somebody’s own wine.
Kotor to Durmitor, the way most first trips run.
Lovcen & Cetinje
DurmitorBy town — wherever you are sleeping
Kotor298 tours
Perast67 tours
Budva51 tours
Tivat31 tours
Podgorica66 tours
Virpazar23 tours
Herceg Novi7 tours- Every tour in Montenegro →
By day — boat, mountain or border?
Latest Montenegro tour reviews.
All recent →
Cruise port Bar – Montenegro tour (Budva,Kotor,Sveti Stefan)
Read our review →
NP Biogradska Gora and Canyon Moraca (Private tour)
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Spiritual Wonders & Scenic Beauty Monastery Tour
Read our review →
Special Montenegro: Lipa cave – Njegoš’s Mausoleum – Njeguši village – Cetinje
Read our review →
Private Blue Cave + All destinations inside Kotor Bay
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Blue Cave & Swimming, Our Lady of The Rocks, Mamula
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