Stari Bar: Montenegro's abandoned town on the hill

A town Venice built, the Ottomans held, and gunpowder finished

Most ruins on this coast are ruins by design: a fortress meant to look imposing from the sea, a monastery left just decayed enough to feel atmospheric. Stari Bar is a different kind of ruin. It was a working town, continuously inhabited for centuries, and then in 1878 a gunpowder magazine stored inside the walls detonated and tore through large parts of it. What’s left is what an actual town looks like after that happens: collapsed arches that once held up roofs, walls that stop mid-storey, streets that lead nowhere because the buildings either side of them are gone.

The town’s history runs longer than that single date. It passed through Venetian control and then Ottoman rule over several hundred years, and the layered architecture still shows it if you look for the details — a doorway shaped one way, a window arch shaped another. By the time the explosion happened, Stari Bar had already survived sieges, changes of ruler and the ordinary wear of centuries. The blast is simply what ended it. The surviving residents moved down the hill to the coast and founded the modern town of Bar, which is where the population, the port and the marina are today. Stari Bar itself was never resettled. It’s had a century and a half to just sit there, and it shows.

If you’ve walked the walls of Kotor’s old town and want to see what the same region’s history looks like without the restoration, tour groups and gelato stands, Stari Bar is the version of that. It isn’t polished for visitors. There’s no boutique hotel wedged into a former palazzo. It’s a genuinely abandoned town on a hill, and the appeal is exactly that it hasn’t been tidied up.

Getting there: roughly two hours from Kotor

Stari Bar sits above the modern town of Bar on Montenegro’s southern coast, and the drive from Kotor takes around two hours, covering roughly 100km depending on which road you take. The straightforward option follows the coast road south through Budva, Petrovac and Sutomore before climbing to the old town above Bar. It’s a longer route on the map than cutting inland, but the road surface and signage are more reliable, and you pass places worth a photo stop if you have the time.

There’s no direct bus that makes this an easy public-transport day trip. Coastal buses connect Kotor to Budva and on towards Bar reasonably well, but reaching Stari Bar itself from the Bar bus station usually means a taxi or a short additional journey, and timings aren’t built around tourist schedules. If you don’t have your own car, see our guide to car rental in Montenegro — for a trip this length, a rental gives you control over the day in a way waiting on connections doesn’t. Fix a taxi price before you get in if you use one from Bar, since meters aren’t always switched on for visitors.

Parking near Stari Bar is informal but generally not a problem outside the height of summer; there’s space near the main entrance to the walls without the scramble you’d get trying to park close to Kotor’s old town.

What’s left inside the walls

Once you’re through the main gate, Stari Bar reads less like a single sight and more like a small district to wander. The collapsed arches are the first thing most people photograph — sections of vaulted stone that once formed the ground floor of houses or covered passages, standing with nothing above them now. Some are stable enough to walk under; others are roped off, and it’s worth respecting that rather than testing centuries-old masonry for yourself.

The town’s former mosque is one of the more intact structures, its walls and part of its dome still standing even where the buildings around it have gone. Nearby, a clock tower marks what would have been a more central point in the town, though like most of Stari Bar it now stands isolated among rubble rather than surrounded by the streets it once served. Neither building is staffed or interpreted with much signage, so you’re largely left to piece together what you’re looking at, which is part of what makes the place feel abandoned rather than curated.

Walking further up takes you past the remains of houses, cisterns and sections of the original town walls, with views opening out over the plain below towards the coast and, on a clear day, towards Lake Skadar in the other direction. There’s no fixed route — you pick a direction and follow what looks passable, which suits a site with no crowds to funnel you along a single path.

Underfoot, expect loose stone, uneven cobbles and drops without railings in places. This isn’t a site that’s been smoothed over for foot traffic, and closed shoes with a decent sole matter more here than almost anywhere else on this coast.

The olive tree older than the ruins themselves

A short walk or drive from the main gate stands a single olive tree, fenced off and signposted, said to be more than a thousand years old and counted among the oldest olive trees in Europe. It predates the 1878 explosion by many centuries and, depending on how you read the claims around its age, may predate the Ottoman period of the town’s history too. Whatever the precise number, it’s old enough that the ruins around it are the newer part of the story.

It’s a low-key stop rather than a spectacle — one gnarled, heavily burred trunk, still producing olives, with a small area around it for visitors to look without climbing on the roots. Most people give it five to ten minutes on the way to or from the main ruins. For more on it and on the wider town of Bar below, see our guide to Bar’s old olive tree and marina.

Practical details: hours, tickets, what to bring

There’s a small entrance fee payable at the gate. It’s modest compared with sites like Kotor’s fortress, but don’t count on a card reader working reliably — bring some euro coins or small notes. The site is open daily in season with no need to book ahead, and visitor numbers are low enough year-round that queuing has never really been the issue here that it is at Kotor’s cruise-ship pinch points.

Shade is limited once you’re past the entrance, so in July and August bring water and sun protection — there’s little relief from the heat once you’re among the open ruins. Off-season, from late autumn through winter, the site is quieter still and the light is often better for photographs, though a few facilities near the entrance may run reduced hours. If you’re weighing up when to make the trip at all, our guide to the best time to visit Kotor and the bay applies just as well to a day trip this far down the coast.

Toilets and a small refreshment stand exist near the entrance but don’t expect much beyond that inside the walls — there’s no café among the ruins, so plan food and water before you go in.

What to check	Detail
Distance from Kotor	About two hours, roughly 100km via the coast road
Time needed on site	60–90 minutes, plus 30–45 for the olive tree
Entrance fee	Small fee at the gate; bring cash
Footwear	Closed shoes with grip — loose stone, uneven ground
Shade	Minimal; carry water in summer
Public transport	Not straightforward; car or taxi recommended

Combining Stari Bar with Lake Skadar or Ulcinj

Given the drive involved, few visitors come from Kotor for Stari Bar alone. The site sits close enough to Lake Skadar and its usual boat-trip base at Virpazar that the two combine into one long day rather than two separate trips. If birdwatching, boat time on the lake and the ruins together sound like a reasonable day, our Lake Skadar boat tour guide and guide to the lake’s carp and eel cover what the water side of that pairing looks like.

Heading the other direction, Ulcinj and its own old town are close enough to Bar to fold into the same day if you start early and don’t linger too long at any one stop — see our Ulcinj old town guide for what that adds. Either pairing makes for a full day out of Kotor rather than a relaxed one, so it’s worth checking our broader guide to how many days to spend around Kotor and the bay if Stari Bar is competing with other day trips on a short itinerary.

For a sense of how a similar disaster reshaped a town closer to home, our piece on Kotor’s own 1979 earthquake and its reconstruction is a useful contrast: one town was rebuilt stone by stone, the other was simply left as it fell.

Booking a guided day out from Kotor

Doing Stari Bar under your own steam is straightforward if you’re comfortable driving Montenegro’s roads and don’t mind a long day. If you’d rather not manage the route, the border-free option, and the timing of pairing it with Lake Skadar yourself, a guided day out handles the logistics for you. A Lake Skadar boat tour with wine tasting that also stops at Stari Bar covers both halves of the day in one booking, with a driver and boat handled for you rather than a rental car and a ferry schedule to plan around.

For a version built specifically around the ruins and the lake’s viewpoints, a guided tour of Stari Bar and Skadar Lake viewpoints with local delicacies included adds a food stop to the history and scenery, which is a reasonable way to fill a long day without having to plan lunch yourself.

If wildlife interests you more than ruins, Lake Skadar is one of the better birdwatching spots in the Balkans, and a guided birdwatching outing on the lake can be arranged as a variation on the same general area, worth considering if Stari Bar becomes a stop rather than the main event of your day.

Anyone weighing this trip against options closer to Kotor should also see our list of day trips for the wider set of choices this stretch of coast offers before committing a full day to the drive south.