From the Durmitor National Park to the Accursed Mountains, you can learn that there’s a whole other world to Montenegro besides its picturesque coastline.
Highlights
- Dinaric Alps’ most scenic regions – Durmitor National Park and Accursed Mountains
- Bay of Kotor from a different perspective
- World-renowned long-distance hiking trail Peaks of the Balkans
- Traditional pastoral villages and stone-built coastal towns
Montenegro Hiking Tours
From the Durmitor National Park to the Accursed Mountains, you can learn that there’s a whole other world to Montenegro besides its picturesque coastline.
Highlights
- Dinaric Alps’ most scenic regions – Durmitor National Park and Accursed Mountains
- Bay of Kotor from a different perspective
- World-renowned long-distance hiking trail Peaks of the Balkans
- Traditional pastoral villages and stone-built coastal towns
Why Visit Montenegro on a Hiking Tour?
Travelers tend to associate Montenegro with sipping a cocktail on one of the sandy beaches in Budva or wandering around the stony seaside towns in the Bay of Kotor.
But there is another side to this Balkan country.
This side includes the Durmitor National Park, Montenegro’s crown jewel and home to its highest summit, Bobotov Kuk, and the rugged Accursed Mountains near the Albanian border, where the Peaks of the Balkans long-distance trek weaves through secluded valleys and scenic mountain passes.
Montenegro’s terrain is comparable to the Alps, comprising steep, rocky, and uneven paths with significant climbs worthy of experienced hikers. These locations are best visited between June and September, while the Bay of Kotor entices hikers during the shoulder season instead.
The Balkans live up to their expectations with public transportation, which is relatively limited. Despite that, reaching the main destinations is not a problem, and taxi services are available when everything else fails.
Additionally, the accommodations in Montenegro are as diverse as its landscapes, from stylish seafront hotels in Kotor to charming mountain hotels in Durmitor National Park and rustic guesthouses in the forgotten valleys of the Accursed Mountains.
In terms of tested and untested, Montenegro lies somewhere in the middle – but what are hikers if not adventurers?
About Hiking in Montenegro
Montenegro is an exercise in disproportion. You could drive across it in a morning, and yet it holds forty-odd limestone peaks in one national park, the deepest canyon in Europe, and a coastline of walled towns beneath the mountains.
Stand on a Durmitor ridge at first light and the scene arranges itself: peaks catching the sun, glacial lakes black and still in their hollows, and somewhere below, the roar of a river you cannot yet see.
Three areas hold nearly all of Montenegro's walking, and each has a signature.
Bobotov Kuk (2,523 m) is the classic Durmitor summit — a final scramble onto a narrow crest with the whole park unfurled beneath and, on a clear day, the sea in the distance.
The Peaks of the Balkans crosses the Prokletije along the Albanian and Kosovan borders.
The Bay of Kotor trails, including the Ladder of Kotor, climb straight out of the fjord to Lovćen.
The mountain season runs mid-June to early October. Snow holds in Durmitor's north-facing cirques into June, and the Prokletije passes open later than the rest.
July and August are warmest and busiest, though Žabljak at 1,450 m stays comfortable when the coast is 35 °C. September is the best month — settled weather, autumn colour in the pine, and quiet trails.
The coast walks well from April to November.
Montenegrins call Durmitor's high lakes gorske oči — "mountain eyes" — and the name fits. The Black Lake mirrors the peaks so perfectly that the world seems doubled, forest and rock hanging upside down in still water.
Around it, Durmitor National Park packs some forty peaks above 2,000 m, eighteen glacial lakes and a network of trails out of Žabljak, the highest town in the Balkans.
Below the peaks lies the Tara River Canyon, the deepest canyon in Europe, its walls dropping some 1,300 m to a torrent of glacier-fed water far beneath.
You walk the rim through black pine that has clung here for centuries, the gorge falling away at your feet. The river itself is drinkable in places and rafted in others — the classic non-walking day on a Durmitor week.
Montenegro's other face is the Bay of Kotor, a drowned river canyon ringed by mountains, with Venetian walled towns at the water's edge.
The walking here goes straight up. Old switchback mule roads and the Ladder of Kotor climb the wall behind the town toward Lovćen, and from the top you look down on the whole bay — a genuinely startling day, and best done early before the heat.
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