Bar Travel Guide, Tours & Hotels

Best time: Spring and autumn
Ideal for: History lovers, day-trippers, ferry travelers
Time needed: 2–3 hours for Stari Bar
Getting there: 1 hr drive or rail link from Podgorica Airport
Region: Ulcinj & the south coast
Nearest airport: Podgorica Airport (TGD), ~65 km

Ideal for

History lovers

Day-trippers

Ferry travelers

About Bar

Modern Bar is Montenegro’s main port, but just inland the abandoned stone town of Stari Bar climbs a hillside beneath the mountains — ringed by some of the oldest olive groves on earth.

Modern Bar is a working port town — the country’s main commercial harbour and the ferry link to Bari, Italy — with little to detain visitors on its own. The reason to come is Stari Bar, the abandoned hilltop town 4 km inland, inhabited from Illyrian and Byzantine times through Venetian and Ottoman rule until it was devastated in the 1878 war that brought Montenegro’s independence, after which residents resettled below and the old town was left to ruin. Its stone walls, cisterns, and the shell of a hammam and clock tower still stand open to the sky. Nearby, the Stara Maslina olive tree, estimated by some counts at around 2,000 years old, is still alive and reputedly among the oldest cultivated olive trees on Earth. King Nikola’s summer palace and botanical park sit on Bar’s seafront, a lower-key echo of his main residence in Cetinje.

Highlights

Stari Bar old town

2,000-year-old olive tree

King Nikola’s palace

Where it is

Stari Bar, the ghost town on the hill

Stari Bar is one of the great ruined cities of the Balkans. Spread over walled terraces on a rocky shelf beneath Mount Rumija, it held more than 200 buildings and was continuously inhabited from early medieval times through Venetian and Ottoman rule. Its decline was sudden: during the siege of 1878, as Montenegro won the town, a powder magazine exploded and much of the upper city was wrecked, never to be rebuilt. Today you wander open ruins of churches, a Turkish bath, cisterns and a clock tower, while a well-preserved Ottoman aqueduct still stalks across the approach. Below the walls, an old bazaar lane and Ottoman bridge survive in the living village.

The oldest olives in Europe

Bar sits amid one of Europe’s densest and oldest olive landscapes — reputedly more than 100,000 trees blanket the coastal slopes. The most famous, the Stara Maslina at Mirovica, is estimated at over 2,000 years old, still bearing fruit within its low protective fence, and ranks among the oldest cultivated olive trees on Earth. Olive oil has anchored the local economy and table for centuries, celebrated at the autumn Maslinijada festival. A visit pairs naturally with a tasting of local oil, cured olives and honey, often at small family groves that welcome curious travellers between the harvest months.

The port, the palace and the great railway

Modern Bar is a purposeful town, rebuilt after WWII around Montenegro’s main port, with car ferries crossing to Bari and Ancona in Italy. It is also the sea terminus of the Belgrade–Bar railway, a 1976 feat of engineering that threads hundreds of tunnels and the soaring Mala Rijeka viaduct through the Dinaric mountains — one of Europe’s most scenic train rides. On the palm-fringed seafront, King Nikola’s Palace of 1885 now houses a local museum and a small botanical garden of exotics the king collected. Above it all rises Mount Rumija, a pilgrimage peak dividing the sea from Lake Skadar.

Getting there and when to go

Bar is about an hour’s drive from Podgorica Airport and doubly connected — by rail north to Podgorica and Belgrade, and by ferry west to Italy — making it a common entry or exit point for the country. Spring and autumn are the best times to explore Stari Bar, whose exposed ruins bake under the midsummer sun. The coast nearby rewards a slower look too: the twin-castle Haj-Nehaj fortress guards the road toward Sutomore, and the vineyards of Crmnica and the shores of Lake Skadar lie just over the hills inland, within an easy half-day’s reach.