Perast and the Islands: A Town With No Traffic Lights

Perast has no traffic lights, no petrol station and no building over three storeys. It has sixteen palaces, seventeen churches, one street along the water and about 240 residents. Three centuries ago it ran a maritime academy where Peter the Great sent Russian noblemen to learn navigation.

You can walk the town in forty minutes. It is not worth the drive on its own — what lies opposite is: two islands, one of them a five-minute boat ride away for about €5 return. Perast is 14 kilometres from Kotor.

The two islands

Our Lady of the Rocks (Gospa od Škrpjela) is a man-made island. The story goes that on 22 July 1452 two sailors found an icon of the Virgin on a submerged rock, and from then on every crew returning from a voyage dropped a stone there. Five centuries of stones and scuttled ships built the island. The custom lives on: every year on 22 July, the day of the Fašinada, a procession of boats carries stones out to the island. How the day unfolds, and which other dates are worth planning a trip around, is in Montenegro’s holidays and festivals.

The church has stood on the island since around 1630. Inside hang some two thousand silver plaques showing ships, each commissioned by someone who survived a storm. There is also an altar cloth embroidered in gold thread by a local woman, Jacinta Kunić-Mijović. Tradition has it that she spent twenty-five years on it, weaving in her own hair — dark at the start, grey at the end — and she finished it in 1828. She was waiting for a sailor who never came back.

St George’s Island is natural, with a 12th-century Benedictine abbey and the graves of Perast captains under cypresses. Landing is forbidden; boats circle it.

Getting out to the island

Boats leave the Perast waterfront continuously, with no timetable: six people gather and off you go. The crossing takes five minutes.

• Boat there and back — about €5 per person
• The church museum — €2–3

People spend twenty to thirty minutes on the island: five to walk round it, the rest on the church and the view.

When to come

Before ten in the morning or after six in the evening. In the middle of the day coach groups arrive and the tiny waterfront gets tight.

The best light is morning: the sun behind you, the islands lit, the water calm. Evening gives you backlight and silhouettes, which also works, though the islands fall into shadow.

In the town itself

• St Nicholas’s church with a 55-metre bell tower. Going up costs €1 and it is the best viewpoint over the islands.
• The Zmajević and Bujović palaces — the second stands right on the water and houses the town museum, entry €8.
• The waterfront, a kilometre end to end: walk it and you have seen Perast.

If you have an hour to spare, Risan is 4 kilometres further along the shore, with its 2nd-century Roman mosaics. Entry is €6; the site is closed on Mondays and for the whole of January.

Cars are left at the entrance — you cannot drive into the town, the single street is too narrow. Parking is paid, €1–2 an hour.

Getting there

From Kotor, 14 kilometres along the bay, 20 minutes. From Budva, 35 kilometres and 50 minutes. From Tivat, forty minutes.

The bus from Kotor runs once an hour, every two hours on Sundays; a ticket to Perast is €1.50, paid in cash to the driver. From Budva you change in Kotor, which makes it about an hour and a half each way. More on transport in Montenegro without a car.

Driving is easier: the road along the bay is the point in itself, and Dobrota and Orahovac are worth a stop. At Orahovac and neighbouring Ljuta there are oyster farms with tables on the water: Oysters and mussels in the Bay of Kotor. Hire options are on the car rental in Kotor page.

Seeing the islands properly

From the shore they are a postcard. From the water they read differently: you can see that Our Lady of the Rocks really was built up, that it stands on a reef, and how deep the water around it is.

A yacht cruise around the bay passes both islands with a swimming stop. It costs from €390 for four hours out of Tivat or from €580 for three hours out of Kotor, and that is the price for the whole boat: see the yacht charter page. The route is described in the cruise from Kotor. Boats run in season only; there are no trips in winter.

The group option is cheaper: a ship around the whole bay with a landing on the island and time in Kotor costs from €53 per person — Bay of Kotor by ship. It runs in season only, and the company behind it works only with Russian-speaking guides. All formats are under things to do.

Boat and entry tickets: prices checked in September 2026; confirm on site.