Writing for the Financial Times this weekend, James Owen discovers a country with a bright future and plenty to appeal to visitors.
"Though some may be ambivalent about the past, Montenegro’s future does seem brighter. In the past few years it has dissolved its union with its larger neighbour Serbia and adopted the euro, and in the travel industry the buzz is that Montenegro is poised to become the next big thing. Nestling between Croatia and Albania, most attention has been focused on its spectacular Adriatic coastline, but I was discovering that its rugged interior also has great appeal.
Largely uninhabited, and the domain still of bears and wolves, Montenegro’s highlands are how much of western Europe must have been before the Industrial Revolution. A landscape of haystacks and close-cropped grass, dotted with wooden byres and an occasional boy herding cows with a stick, gave way as I drove north to a wilderness of curving mountain roads, undulating plateaux and dense pine forests. At the small ski resort of Zabljak, the focus of much of Tito’s partisan activity during the second world war, the early morning air had a chill to it even beneath a blue autumnal sky, and life was still hard; the town’s water supply was limited to eight hours a day.
A few hundred yards from St Michael’s, I stood on the bridge that crosses Europe’s deepest canyon, the Tara River gorge. The darting blue flight of a jay drew my eyes to a scene constructed on a scale of African immensity, the green flanks of the mountains plunging a kilometre and a half down to the bright water.
The narrow road that runs alongside it twists through woods of beech and oak and filtered sunlight. Having skirted the country’s blighted Communist-era capital, Podgorica, the river emerges 200km later at one of Europe’s largest lakes, Skadar. While I stood and breathed in the evening air, a fisherman rowed into the mists that rose from Albania beyond, searching for carp.
The water is fringed by high hills that separate it from the Adriatic Riviera. The bumpy road that runs over the crest was strewn with rubble seemingly abandoned by work gangs, a fatalistic approach to neatness and safety that reminded me that these had once been the border lands of the Ottoman Empire. The coast, however, was the preserve of Venetian influence, and along its length, as in Croatia, there sprang up mini-Serenissimas, walled towns whose winding alleys mimicked those of the mother city.
The pearl among these is the island of Sveti Stefan, a tightly wound knot of mellowed stone and red tiles joined to the mainland by a short causeway. In the 1960s, the whole village was turned into a luxury hotel, frequented by jet-setters such as Princess Margaret. In more recent times, however, its profile has declined, and when I arrived at the gates at the end of a causeway that leads to the island, they were locked following a recent takeover by the Aman Resorts group.
Aman has bought a 30-year lease on the hotel and two other sites nearby, including the former summer residence of the Yugoslav royal family. They have chosen well. The Milocer palace stands on the prettiest of coves, a broad crescent of sand encircling the incomparably clear water of the Adriatic. With half a dozen others, I stood on the beach and watched the setting sun paint strokes of rose, deepening to crimson, on the walls of the palace lawn. For a few moments, I shared the privilege of kings – then we were barked at, unnecessarily fiercely, by security guards.
Things are clearly about to change in Sveti Stefan. Soon much of this idyllic resort will be off-limits, if not formally then by virtue of its prices. Already the attendants demand €10 – the price of a meal – if you want to park your car, and Russian investors are starting to construct hotels and huge villas along the once pristine shoreline. No doubt this is good for the economy but it also risks spoiling what draws tourists in the first place.
For the time being, there are still long-buried treasures to discover. The Tara canyon and the town of Kotor make up the two World Heritage Sites in Montenegro. Above the jumble of Kotor’s pink-and-white marble lanes, overlooked by curtseying ironwork balconies, long walls climbed to a peak where the Montenegrin flag glinted gold and red. Kotor sits on a double bay, shaded by palms, that for centuries prospered from trade and fishing. Driving towards it from Dubrovnik, I passed the remains of Roman mosaics, a church that had commissioned a painting by Bellini, and a once stately home that now housed only browsing goats.
Along the coast, I learnt, time had dealt even more harshly with the town of Budva. In 1979, it had been levelled by an earthquake but its imposing walls and chocolate-box assortment of houses have since been immaculately restored. At the centre of Budva lies a square with half a dozen churches, where at Sunday mass I heard the rise and fall of the Orthodox chant blending harmoniously with the Catholic litany across the way. Outside, an elderly man stood proudly for a photograph next to a slim young woman. Were they related, I asked? No – she reminded him of his first wife.
Later that day, I stood on the hill above Petrovac, looking at a harmonious arc of blue sea and green headland as blissful as any I have seen. Twenty years hence, perhaps, this delightful nation will have gone the way of Spain, buried under concrete and speculation. I do hope not; but now is certainly the time to see Montenegro".
