Your reporters set out on another trip along the home coast, this time to bring you the atmosphere of the stretch that most visitors drive through without stopping. The subject is the middle of the Bay of Kotor: the narrows at Verige, the ferry landing at Kamenari, and the watery village of Morinj at the head of the inner bay. It is perhaps twenty kilometres of road, and it contains most of what makes Boka what it is.
East out of Herceg Novi
Leaving Herceg Novi, the road runs through Igalo, Zelenika, Kumbor, Đenovići and Baošići, past the shipyard cranes at Bijela, with the water on one side and steep wooded slope on the other. For that whole stretch you are technically in the Bay of Kotor, but you do not really feel it. The outer bay is wide and open, and it reads like ordinary Adriatic coast.
Then the shore closes in. As people from Herceg Novi will tell you, once Verige is behind you and Perast appears around the bend, a completely new world begins: another climate, other colours, everything somehow different. The mountains stand directly over the water, the light changes, and the bay stops being a coastline and becomes an inland sea.
Verige, and why the bay was defensible
Verige is the throat of Boka, the point where the bay narrows to roughly 300 metres between Kamenari on the north shore and Lepetane on the south. The name means chains, and it is literal: chains were strung across the strait on floats to stop enemy galleys from reaching the inner bays, a defence used in the centuries when Kotor, Risan and Perast were the prizes worth taking. Batteries later stood on both headlands for the same reason.
The geography that made the bay defensible also made it famous. Boka is often described as the southernmost fjord in Europe, and the old text on this page uses that word too, but geologically it is a ria, a river canyon drowned when sea levels rose after the last glaciation. That is why the walls fall so steeply into water that is deep right up to the shore. The whole of the bay, with its towns and fortifications, has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1979.
Kamenari and the crossing
Kamenari is a small place with an outsized function: it is the northern terminal of the ferry across the strait to Lepetane. The crossing takes about ten minutes and cuts out something like forty-five kilometres of driving around the inner bay through Risan, Perast and Kotor, which is why anyone heading from Herceg Novi towards Tivat, the airport or Budva takes it. Ferries run year-round and frequently in summer; you queue, drive on, and pay on board.
Whether the crossing is the right choice depends on what you are doing. If you are in a hurry, take it. If you have an afternoon, stay on the northern shore and drive the long way around, because that road passes everything below.
Morinj: mills, springs and the head of the bay
The first substantial place past Kamenari is Morinj, spread along the shore where the bay turns towards Risan. Morinj is defined by fresh water. Karst springs surface at the foot of the mountain and run down to the sea in a matter of a few hundred metres, and that short, powerful flow was once the village's industry: the streams turned a series of stone watermills, and their remains, along with the channels and small bridges that served them, are what people come to photograph. Few of the mills survived into the new millennium in working order, but the setting they were built into is intact.
The water also explains the vegetation. Morinj is greener than the coast further out, with chestnut, fig and oleander crowding the old stone houses, and the beaches here are pebble and shaded rather than open and hot. The reason is straightforward: the slopes above this part of the bay are among the wettest inhabited places in Europe, and the village of Crkvice on the ridge above Risan has recorded some of the highest annual rainfall totals on the continent. What falls up there comes out down here.
What else is on this shore
- Lipci, between Morinj and Risan, where prehistoric rock drawings of deer and hunting scenes survive under a shallow rock shelter beside the old road.
- Risan, the oldest settlement in the bay and once an Illyrian royal seat, with Roman floor mosaics including the well-known sleeping figure of Hypnos.
- Kostanjica and Strp, quiet chestnut villages strung along the water between Morinj and Perast.
- Perast and its two islets, a few minutes further on, where the bay opens again below Sveti Ilija.
Come in late spring or September if you can. In high summer the road through Kamenari carries the whole of the coastal traffic, and the ferry queue is part of the experience whether you want it to be or not. Out of season, this shore is close to silent, and the water in the inner bay is glassy in the mornings.
