Why Kotor is full of cats

I’d been in Kotor old town for about twenty minutes on my first morning before I noticed I’d photographed more cats than churches. One was asleep on a Napoleon-era cannon by the Sea Gate. Another sat on the steps of a house near the cathedral like it owned the building, which, in a sense, it did. By the end of the week I’d stopped counting and started asking why. The answer turns out to be older, more practical, and less sentimental than the postcards suggest.

Grain ships, rats, and a job with no job title

Kotor spent nearly four centuries, from 1420 to 1797, as a Venetian naval and trading port, one of the fortified stops the Republic of Venice kept along the Adriatic to protect its shipping lanes. Grain, salt, and other cargo moved through the harbour in wooden holds that rats found just as useful as sailors did. Ships of the period carried cats as working crew, not pets, because a cat in the hold was the only reliable defence against a rat problem that could spoil a season’s cargo or spread disease on a long voyage.

When ships docked in Kotor to load or unload, their cats came ashore with the goods, worked the warehouses along the harbourfront, and in many cases simply stayed. There’s no single surviving document that pins the story to Kotor by name, but the sequence fits: a walled port town, centuries of Venetian grain traffic, and a resident cat population concentrated for generations around the harbour and the old town’s narrow lanes, exactly where the trading houses and storerooms once stood. It’s the explanation locals give, and the geography of where the cats still live backs it up more than any myth about a shipwreck or a single lucky litter would.

From ship’s crew to old town fixture

What’s changed is the job. Nobody’s hauling grain through Kotor’s harbour any more, and the cats that remain aren’t earning their keep catching vermin, not really. They’re a fixture of the old town in the way any long-settled population becomes part of a place’s identity, alongside the 1979 earthquake reconstruction that rebuilt the stonework around them and the Venetian sea captains whose houses still line the lanes near the cathedral.

You’ll find them draped over café chairs on the Square of Arms, curled in doorways off the route toward the maritime museum, and lined up with unnerving precision outside restaurant kitchens around dinner service. They’re used to people. Decades of tourist contact have made most of them approachable but not needy, which is part of why they photograph so well.

Who actually feeds them

This is the part visitors usually get wrong. The cats aren’t strays surviving on scraps and tourist affection. Local residents and animal welfare associations run a network of communal feeding stations tucked into corners of the old town, refilled daily with dry food, and several groups coordinate neutering programmes to keep the population from growing unchecked. It’s an organised, if informal, system, funded partly by small donation boxes you’ll spot near some of the bowls and partly by residents who’ve simply adopted a stretch of street as their responsibility.

That matters for what you should and shouldn’t do. Giving a cat a piece of prsut from your plate at a restaurant near where to eat in Kotor old town feels generous, but cured meat is heavily salted and hard on a cat’s kidneys, and milk causes digestive upset in most adult cats regardless of what the cartoons suggest. If you want to feed one, a bag of plain dry cat food from a local shop does more good than table scraps, and if you’d rather not carry food around, dropping a coin in one of the donation boxes supports the same associations doing the daily work.

The Cats Museum

A short walk from the Square of Arms, close enough to fold into a stroll along the old town walking route, sits the Cats Museum, a single small room rather than anything grand. It’s a private collection of postcards, engravings, photographs, and cat-themed ephemera gathered over years, with an entry price of a couple of euros. Ten to fifteen minutes covers it comfortably. It won’t anchor a day out on its own, but as a five-minute detour explaining why the town has leaned so hard into its feline reputation, it earns the stop.

The postcard economy

Cats sell. Walk any lane near the main gates and you’ll pass shops selling cat magnets, cat tote bags, cat-shaped soap, and prints of the same ginger tom that’s probably asleep two doors down. It’s a genuine local industry now, not manufactured for visitors from nothing: the town leaned into an existing quirk rather than inventing one. Whether that tips into overkill is a matter of taste, but it’s mild compared to some UNESCO towns’ souvenir strips, and at least the cats being sold on postcards are the same ones you’ll actually see wandering the Square of Arms an hour later.

a tuk-tuk loop past the old harbourfront and out toward Prčanj is a decent way to see where the working cats of the Venetian era would actually have come ashore, since the old customs house and warehouse district sat along that same stretch of water. If you’d rather see the bay itself, where those grain ships sailed in from, a half-day trip covering Kotor, Perast, and Budva takes in the wider Boka in a few hours.

Best time to see them, and a note on the museum’s near neighbours

Cats keep sensible hours in summer. Midday heat between roughly 10am and 4pm, the same window when cruise-ship crowds pack the old town, sends most of them into the shade of a doorway or under a parked scooter. Arrive before 9.30am or return after 5pm and you’ll see far more of them out and active, alongside a quieter old town generally. If you’re building cats into a longer stroll, pairing it with the night walk along the city walls or a slow lap through Perast and Risan for the day makes more of the trip than the cats alone would.

Families travelling with children tend to enjoy this stop more than most historical sites, and it fits naturally into a broader Kotor with kids day or a simple one-day itinerary built around the old town. Just keep the ham in your sandwich, not in the cat’s mouth.

Questions about Kotor’s cats

Why are there so many cats in Kotor?

Venetian trading ships that used Kotor’s harbour from the 15th to the 18th century carried cats to control rats among their grain cargo, and the cats stayed on around the port and its warehouses. Today the old town’s cat population is sustained by local residents and animal associations who run communal feeding stations, not by the ships that started it.

Is it true Kotor’s cats came from Venetian ships?

It’s the most consistent local explanation and it fits the historical facts: Kotor was under Venetian rule from 1420 to 1797, and ship’s cats were standard practice on grain vessels of that period across the Adriatic. There’s no single document that proves it for Kotor specifically, but the timeline and the cats’ concentration around the old harbourfront line up with the story.

Can I feed the cats in Kotor old town?

Most of them are already fed daily by local associations using dry cat food, so an extra bowl isn’t necessary. If you do want to feed one, plain dry kibble is fine; never give them prsut, cheese, or milk, all of which are difficult for cats to digest and are a genuine health risk repeated across hundreds of tourist encounters a day.

Where is the cat museum in Kotor?

The Cats Museum sits in a small townhouse just off the Square of Arms in the old town, a few minutes’ walk from the main Sea Gate. It’s a single small room of postcards, engravings, and photographs rather than a full-scale museum, and a visit takes ten to fifteen minutes.

What time of day is best to see the cats?

Early morning before 9.30am and the evening after 5pm, the same quiet hours that suit the old town generally once the cruise-ship crowds have thinned. Midday in high season brings both the heaviest foot traffic and the heaviest heat, and the cats mostly retreat to shade until it passes.

Do the cats belong to anyone?

A handful are owned by shopkeepers and restaurant staff, but most are a free-roaming colony maintained collectively. Local and international animal welfare associations coordinate feeding, neutering, and occasional veterinary care, funded partly by donation boxes you’ll see near some of the feeding points.

Are Kotor’s cats a health or hygiene concern?

They’re generally in reasonable condition thanks to the feeding and neutering programmes, and bites or scratches are rare because most are used to tourists and keep their distance rather than approach aggressively. As with any street animal, avoid picking them up and don’t let children corner them.