Bioča

Bioča is a small village in the Podgorica municipality, in the transitional country where the flat Zeta plain gives way to the low hills of the interior. It is a rural settlement in the plainest sense: a scatter of houses along a road, gardens and small holdings behind them, and pasture and scrub running up the slopes beyond. There is no centre to speak of and no tourist infrastructure, which is precisely what makes it a useful window onto how much of Montenegro outside the coast and the cities actually lives. The land around Bioča is worked in the way the hinterland has been worked for generations — vegetable plots and fruit trees close to the houses, vines on the warmer slopes, sheep and a few cattle on the rougher ground. The climate here is the Podgorica climate, which means hot, dry summers where midday shuts everything down and work happens early and late, and mild wet winters that keep the hills green when the high north is under snow. Stone field walls, old wells and abandoned outbuildings mark generations of settlement. Its practical value to a traveller is position. Podgorica and its transport links are close, and from this side of the capital the roads run quickly north into the Morača canyon, west toward Nikšić and Ostrog, and south to Lake Skadar and the coast. Anyone driving between those places passes through country like this, and stopping in it — buying fruit at a roadside stand, walking a farm track for half an hour — costs nothing and tells you more than another monument. Bioča suits travellers with their own transport who are interested in ordinary rural Montenegro rather than sights, and people staying in village accommodation near the capital. Spring and autumn are the most pleasant seasons; midsummer in the Zeta basin is among the hottest weather in the country.