Bay of Kotor
Бока Которска
Interesting facts
- Crkvice, in the mountains above the bay, receives close to 5,000 mm of rain a year, among the wettest inhabited places in Europe.
- The Sopot spring near Risan is usually dry, but after heavy rain a waterfall bursts from the cliff about 20 metres above the sea.
- In winter the Bora wind can gust up to 250 km/h in the Bay of Risan, dropping temperatures sharply within hours.
- Our Lady of the Rocks off Perast is an artificial islet, built up from stones and old ships loaded with rocks and sunk on the spot.
- According to legend, sailors found an icon of the Madonna on a sea rock in 1452 and vowed to add a stone after every safe voyage.
- Every 22 July at sunset, locals still row out to throw rocks around Our Lady of the Rocks in a ritual called the fašinada.
- The islet's museum holds an embroidery by Jacinta Kunić-Mijović of Perast, who worked strands of her own hair into it over 25 years.
- The bay's merchant fleet peaked at around 300 ships in the 18th century, when it rivalled Dubrovnik and Venice.
- Under Austro-Hungarian rule, most of the sea captains of the Österreichischer Lloyd shipping company came from the Bay of Kotor.
- Despite its mountain walls, the bay is only about 60 metres deep at most, with a shoreline of roughly 107 km.
Why it is worth it
Guidebooks reach for the word "fjord" to describe Kotor's bay so often that it's become the default description, and geologically it's not quite right — this is Europe's southernmost inlet of its kind, but it wasn't carved by a glacier the way a true fjord is. What actually happened is that an ancient river valley, part of a drainage system geologists trace back toward the Bojana river, collapsed and flooded as the Adriatic Sea rose after the last ice age, leaving behind a shape that looks like a fjord — steep limestone walls, a winding, deep channel — without the ice-age mechanism that usually produces one.
The bay's shape did more than create a nice view: it built a natural fortress. The inlet narrows to just 300 metres at the Verige Strait before opening back out into a wide inner basin, a chokepoint narrow enough that a chain could once be stretched across it to block enemy ships — which is exactly what happened during multiple historical sieges. Whoever controlled that strait controlled the entire inner bay, and the town of Kotor at its innermost point became worth fighting over for exactly that reason: a harbour effectively immune to naval assault, backed by mountains that supplied both limestone for building and timber for ships.
Venice held the bay for nearly four centuries, from 1420 to 1797, and the walls it left behind at Kotor climb the mountainside directly above the old town — up to 20 metres high in places and as much as 16 metres thick at the base, built and rebuilt in stages from the ninth century through the eighteenth. The fortifications, together with the old town they were built to protect, are listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, one of the more intact examples anywhere in Europe of a fortified harbour town built specifically to exploit a bay's natural defences rather than fight against its geography.
Getting there
11 km from Herceg Novi. Tivat Airport (TIV) is about 7 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Our Lady of the Rocks 4.4 km · island
- Fortifications of Kotor 8.8 km · city-walls
- Njegoš Mausoleum 14.9 km · mausoleum
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Bay of Kotor, also known as the Gulf of Kotor or just as the Boka, is a winding bay of the Adriatic Sea in southwestern Montenegro and the region of Montenegro concentrated around the bay. It is also the southernmost part of the historical region of Dalmatia. At the entrance to the Bay there is Prevlaka, a small peninsula in southern Croatia.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
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