Hiking the Old Walls of Kotor for Amazing Views

Kotor, Montenegro

So this is the last post from our trip to Croatia & Montenegro back in October (I kind of took an unitentional blogging break and never got round to posting this). It was such a great trip and I’m dying to go back and explore more of both countries as they were both so beautiful!

So after exploring Perast and taking a boat over to Our Lady of the Rocks, we took a drive over to Kotor. I’d seen the views over the bay from the Old Walls pretty much everywhere online before we visited, so my only wish while we were there was to hike to the top to see it for myself.

We parked up in the shopping centre car park (we were amazed by how cheap this was – I think we got a discount for going to the grocery shop there too? We saw the car infront hand over their receipt with the carpark ticket to the guy in the booth, so we did the same and I think it came to under €5 for a good 3/4 hours parking) and then took a little walk over to the Old City.

We picked up a map from the tourist information centre just outside the front of Kotor Old City by the port and saw that the easiest route was starting at the left hand side of the city by the river. There’s two entrances, but this one seems to be the main one.

It was a little hard to find – you kind of just go up a street that looks like a dead end with houses and people’s washing hanging (4th photo in this post), turn a corner and there’s a woman sitting under an umberella taking admission fees. We paid a couple of euros each and started the ascent. I don’t think we were prepared by just how hard it was!

The walls are literally crumbling rocks with not so sturdy rock stairs on one side and a rock path on the other, though to be fair they were built around the 12th Century. We found it easier to walk up the path and down the stairs, which was what pretty much everyone else was doing too. I was amazed by how far up the mountain the walls actually go – they’re over 4km in length around the whole city going 1200m high to the Castle of San Giovanni at the top.

Sadly, we didn’t quite make it to the top. We got there quite late in the day, and the light was starting to go but we made it just over 3/4 of the way up in about an hour or so – I’d recommend about 3 hours to do the whole thing. I was so gutted that we were so close to the top and didn’t make it, though the views the whole way up were just absolutely stunning over the Bay of Kotor.

I’d love to go back again and see more of the country. Budva looks amazing, and so do the mountain regions. It’s definitely a road trip country! Have you been to Montenegro before?