North of Petrovac the coast turns to cliff, and the only way along it on foot is one of the more unusual short walks in Montenegro: a cliffside path that dives straight through the headlands in a chain of hand-cut tunnels before delivering you, blinking into the light, in front of a colossal abandoned hotel.
The health trail and its tunnels
Locals call it the staza zdravlja, the health trail. It begins at the northern edge of Petrovac and runs for about twenty-five minutes through coastal pine, opening onto some of the finest views of the open Adriatic and, looking back, the islets of Katič and Sveta Nedjelja. Where the rock refuses to let the path around, the path simply goes through it: a series of tunnels carved by hand directly into the cliff.
The longest of them runs close to 497 metres, a genuinely long dark bore through solid stone. Until recently you needed a torch or a phone light to get through the blackest stretches; today the main tunnels have been cleaned up and lit, and the walk that once felt slightly hair-raising is now an easy, atmospheric passage — cool stone, echoing footsteps, a disc of blue light growing at the far end.
Perazića Do and the concrete giant
The last tunnel ends on a small cinematic reveal. The darkness gives way and there, framed by the sea, stands the Hotel As: an enormous unfinished concrete skeleton looming over the little cove of Perazića Do, rusted cranes still standing where the builders left them.
The As was meant to be a flagship. Begun in the 1980s during the Yugoslav era, it was designed as a luxury resort of its moment, complete with a saltwater pool that older locals still remember swimming in as children, along with an arcade game room. Then Yugoslavia came apart, and the hotel's fate became a case study in how privatisation went wrong on this coast.
A privatisation that failed
The As was put up for sale in 2001 and sold in 2002 — one of the very first hotel privatisations in Montenegro's tourism industry. The buyer, a company presented as a Montenegrin-Russian venture, paid several million marks with a binding commitment to invest many times that into rebuilding the property. The reconstruction ran for roughly three years and then stopped. The government terminated the contract, citing the delays and false guarantees, and the legal wrangling dragged on for years afterward while the site simply sat there, a half-built ghost over the water.
The numbers behind the failure became notorious. The property changed hands for a few million marks on the promise that many times that sum — reported at around 22 million — would be poured into finishing and reconstructing it. Instead the works stalled after about three years and the money never materialised as promised, leaving the state to unwind the deal and the shell to rot. The result is one of the most photographed ruins on the coast — a monument, depending on your mood, to failed ambition or to the strange beauty of concrete reclaimed by sea light. From the shoreline and the tunnel mouth it is genuinely spectacular, the raw grey frame set against water that is almost implausibly turquoise.
The cove below
Perazića Do itself is worth the walk beyond the drama of the ruin. It is a small, wild cove — pebble shore, clear water, a fraction of the crowds of the town beaches — and precisely because it was never finished as a resort, it has stayed quiet and undeveloped. Swimmers who make the trail crossing are rewarded with a cool, clean dip in a setting that feels a long way from Petrovac's busy promenade, even though it is only twenty-five minutes away on foot.
A word of caution
Photograph it from outside, and stop there. Do not go into the building. The interior is an unmaintained, unregulated construction site: open drops with no railings, exposed reinforcing bar, loose debris and decades of decay. It has never been made safe for visitors and it never will be in its current state. The walk and the view are the reward; the ruin is best admired from a distance.
The trail forms part of the coastal route north from town — you can pick it up on the Roman Road walk's Perazića Do stage.
Visiting
Start from the northern end of Petrovac's seafront and allow around twenty-five minutes each way at an easy pace; the path is mostly level but the tunnel floors can be damp, so wear proper shoes. The lit tunnels make a torch optional now, though it is still worth carrying one. Go in daylight, keep well clear of the hotel structure, and turn the walk into a swim at the quiet Perazića Do cove below.