
When planning a family trip to Montenegro last spring, I found myself telling perplexed friends who knew next to nothing about the Balkan country: “Imagine yourself in Venice, sail down the Adriatic coast, look east and stop before you reach Albania.”
But since President Trump described the country, in a Fox News interview in July, as likely to trigger World War III and Montenegrins as “very aggressive,” the questions have trended from “Where is it?” to “What’s there?”
For starters, there is a dramatic natural beauty, including the imposing mountains that wall the coast and inspired 15th-century Venetians to name it Monte Negro, or Black Mountain.
More invested in tourism — which accounts for over 20 percent of the economy — than war, Montenegro attracted two million visitors last year, more than three times its population, according to the national tourism office.
A statement from the government in reaction to Mr. Trump’s characterization cited Montenegro’s “peaceful politics,” noting that during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, the country was “the only state in which the war didn’t rage during disintegration of the former Yugoslavia,” of which it was a part.
As the granddaughter of immigrants from Montenegro and a repeat traveler in the region, my experience of Montenegrin aggression is limited to receiving large portions of food and admonishments to clean my plate.
Mr. Trump wasn’t wrong about the country’s size though. NATO’s newest member, which declared independence from Serbia in 2006, is indeed small. Slightly less diminutive than Connecticut, it’s just right for a typically time-pinched American vacation, which, in our case, was eight days in May.
“You cannot imagine how such a small country has everything: national parks, mountains, beaches, night life, history, Orthodox monasteries,” said Nina Batlak, a Dubrovnik-based product manager for Super Luxury Travel, which offers trips in Montenegro. “Everything fits in such small borders.”
Many travelers set out from Dubrovnik, the popular walled city on the southern Croatian coast, about an hour’s drive from the border. But we found that flying into the capital of Podgorica put us within easy striking distance of a variety of attractions: the Dinaric Alps in the north, the Adriatic coast to the south, and the cultural treasures of mid-Montenegro.
Most visitors come for the sea, a crowd-eluding alternative that historically has been popular with Russians and Ukrainians seeking warm weather. Compared with its neighbor across the Adriatic, it’s “a more affordable Italy,” said Joanna Millick, director of sales and private journeys at MIR Corporation, which offers Balkan tours.
Ancient towns, from Herceg Novi on the edge of the Bay of Kotor to walled Ulcinj near the Albanian border, dot the 70-mile coastal drive. Construction is rampant, suggesting more, if not mass, tourism isn’t too distant. We found crews restoring the Venetian palaces lining seafront Perast.
Those, along with the Ottoman forts strung along the coast, testify to the centuries-long fight for control of this strategic region by the great seafaring powers of the 14th- through mid-19th-century. (Montenegro only began to gain its shore from the Ottomans and the Austrians in the late 1800s.)
Not that tourism is exactly new: After all, in the 1970s, celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Sophia Loren vacationed at Sveti Stefan, a peninsular village-turned-luxury-resort, now run by Aman hotels and still favored by the glitterati (the Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic was married here in 2014). But more recent foreign investment has fueled its expansion, with luxury developments like Porto Montenegro in Tivat, home to a Regent hotel and a yacht marina, and the Miami-like high-rises that surround the walled heart of Budva, now filled with restaurants and cafes.
Credit: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/22/travel/montenegro.html
Article written by Elaine Glusac
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