Bistrica

Bistrica is a village in northern Montenegro, in the Bijelo Polje municipality, set where the Bistrica river comes down out of the hills to join the Lim. Bijelo Polje itself is a short drive away.

Easier than its size suggests. The village lies on the main corridor between Bijelo Polje and the Serbian border, and the Belgrade–Bar railway runs through the valley here, so it can be reached without a car.

A farming settlement of scattered houses, hayfields and mixed forest spread over rolling ground rather than clustered around a centre. Meadows are still cut for hay in high summer, smallholdings keep a few cows and sheep, and plum and apple orchards line the slopes above the river.

None in the conventional sense, and nothing here is organised around visitors. The appeal is the landscape and the pace: unhurried, agricultural, and generous in the way northern Montenegrin villages tend to be with anyone who stops.

The river holds trout and forest tracks climb into the hills on both sides of the valley. Bjelasica and Biogradska Gora national park lie to the south-west, the Djalovica gorge and its cave system to the south, and the Tara canyon and its rafting stretches beyond.

Travellers with a car working their way through the north, people looking for village accommodation and home cooking rather than hotels, and anyone crossing between Montenegro and Serbia who would rather break the journey somewhere quiet. Late spring through autumn is the season.