Beaches in Montenegro

Under three hundred kilometres of Adriatic coast with mountains directly behind it, so the beaches are short, pebbled and hemmed in — the Dinaric wall comes down almost to the water for most of the length. The Bay of Kotor in the north is a drowned river canyon rather than a fjord, walled, photogenic and almost without sand, with Venetian towns around its edge and a World Heritage listing over the whole of it. The middle coast around Budva has the resort development and the island-hotels, Sveti Stefan among them: a fishing village on a tied islet, emptied of its inhabitants in the 1950s and converted whole. The southern coast towards Ulcinj has what sand there is, including Velika Plaža, twelve kilometres of it and the longest beach on the eastern Adriatic, with a salt pan behind it that is a major bird site. Beaches are public by law, a point that has been litigated over the Sveti Stefan lease and is worth knowing where a hotel implies otherwise. Practically: the season runs June to September and the coast is busy and expensive within it, the coastal road is single carriageway and slow in August, and most beaches are managed concessions where a sunbed is the default and free sand is a strip. The water is clear and warms to the mid-twenties.