As soon as you pass Budva the pleasure does not stop. Our reporters were completely won over by the idyll of Miločer, which looks more like something out of a story than a real place on a real coast. It is small: a wooded point between Pržno and Sveti Stefan, a stone villa under the pines, two beaches and a park. But it is the most carefully kept few hectares on the Montenegrin littoral, and it repays a slow morning.
A royal summer house
The villa at the centre of Miločer was built in 1934 as the summer residence of Queen Marija of the Karađorđević dynasty, then the ruling house of Yugoslavia. It is a low, restrained building in local stone with arched loggias facing the sea, deliberately modest by the standards of European royal architecture, and it was chosen for the site rather than the other way round.
Around it the royal household laid out a park on the whole promontory, planting Aleppo and stone pines, cypresses, olives, oleander and a long list of subtropical species brought in from elsewhere in the Mediterranean and beyond. Ninety years on, the planting has matured into deep shade with the sea flashing through it, and the park is the real attraction: gravel paths, dry-stone terraces, sudden openings onto the water.
The two beaches
In this much natural abundance it is hard to pick the finest thing, but most people settle on the beaches. Miločer beach lies directly below the villa, a short crescent of fine pink-tinged pebble under the pines. A few minutes south along the shore path is Kraljičina plaža, the Queen's Beach, a small cove closed in by rock and olive trees where the sand is genuinely pink in certain light and the water is deep almost immediately.
One practical warning. For years the villa, the park beaches and the islet of Sveti Stefan next door have been run together as a single luxury resort, and access to the beaches inside the park has been restricted or charged during the season while the arrangement is in force. The situation has changed more than once. Check what applies before you plan a swimming day here, and have Pržno or Sveti Stefan's public beach as a fallback.
Walking the shore
The best way to take Miločer in is on foot, from north to south. Start at Pržno, a working fishing village with a small harbour, boats pulled up on the pebbles and restaurants along the waterfront, and pick up the coastal path where the houses end.
The path runs into the park almost immediately and stays a few metres above the water the whole way: olives and pines on one side, the open sea on the other, with benches at the viewpoints. You pass below the villa, come out at Miločer beach, continue past Kraljičina plaža and finish looking across the sandbar at Sveti Stefan, the fortified fishing village turned resort on its own islet. The whole walk takes under half an hour at a stroll and is the single most photographed stretch of the Montenegrin coast for good reason.
Getting there
Miločer sits roughly five kilometres south of Budva on the Adriatic highway, between Pržno and Sveti Stefan. Local buses along the coast road stop at both villages and the walk down to the shore takes a few minutes; by car, park in Pržno or at Sveti Stefan rather than trying to get closer, since the park itself is pedestrian. Water taxis from Budva run the same short stretch in summer and give you the view from the sea, which is the one the villa was designed for.
When to visit
Late May, June and September are the pick. The park is at its greenest before the summer dries it out, the sea is warm from mid-June onwards, and the coast path is bearable in the middle of the day, which it is not in August. Winter visits have their own argument: the pines and palms stay green, the light off the water is low and clean, and you will have the promenade to yourself.
Peace and quiet, olives and pines, palm trees, the bay and the open sea: that is Miločer, and it is only a few minutes off the busiest road on the coast.
