Stari Bar: €5 entry, opening times, 2,000-year-old olive

Entry to Stari Bar costs €5, or €1 for children aged 6–14, and in summer the ruins are open from 8:00 to 20:00; in winter they close at 17:00. Stari Bar, “Old Bar”, is a ruined medieval town on Londža hill, whose highest point is 151 metres above the sea, 4–5 km inland, behind the modern port of Bar on Montenegro’s southern coast. In 1878 the Montenegrins took it after a long siege; later two gunpowder explosions and an earthquake finished it off, and life moved down to the shore, where the new town of Bar now stands.

A couple of kilometres from the gate grows Stara Maslina, an olive tree more than two thousand years old, which costs €2 to see. Together they make a half day out and, to our mind, one of the most underrated trips on the coast. Bar is about 40 km south of Budva and 27 km north of Ulcinj.

In short

• Tickets: €5, children aged 6–14 €1, under-sixes free. Bring cash.
• Opening times: 8:00–20:00 in summer, until 17:00 in winter.
• Time needed: 1–2 hours for the ruins, half a day with the bazaar and the olive tree.
• Getting there: about 41 km and an hour from Budva, about 57 km from Podgorica; parking by the entrance is up to €1 an hour.
• Stara Maslina: about 1.8 km from the gate, €2.
• On a tour: “Shkodër and Stari Bar”, from €53, back in summer 2027.

Tickets, opening times and cash

An adult ticket is €5, children aged 6–14 pay €1 and under-sixes go free. You will still see €3 quoted in older guides and on some websites, but that is the old price: the current one has applied since 1 January 2024. Carry cash: card payment at the ticket office is hit and miss.

In summer the gates open at 8:00 and close at 20:00; in winter they close at 17:00. Allow an hour or two to walk the ruins.

What was Stari Bar?

The Italians called the town Antivari. It was Byzantine until the middle of the 11th century, belonged to Venice from 1443 to 1571 and to the Ottoman Empire from 1571 to 1878. At its height there were more than two hundred buildings inside the walls.

The Montenegrin siege began in November 1877. In January 1878 the besiegers blew up the water supply and the garrison surrendered; the Congress of Berlin then gave the town to Montenegro. After that it was destroyed without a war: gunpowder stores exploded in 1881 and again in 1912, and the earthquake of April 1979 brought down the aqueduct. With no water, the last residents left, and the new Bar was built on the coast.

So there is no polish here. Streets, walls and houses stand without roofs. This is not a restored stage set but a genuine ruin, and that is most of its appeal.

What to see inside

The gate and the walls. The cobbled bazaar street runs up to the fortress gate; beyond it are the remains of houses, churches and fortifications.

St George’s Cathedral was the town’s main church; under the Ottomans it was turned into a mosque.

The hammam, an 18th-century Turkish bath, was built on the site of a Venetian palace. You can still see the light holes in its vault.

The clock tower dates from the middle of the 18th century.

The aqueduct, from the 16th–17th century, has 17 stone arches and carried water about 3 km from Mount Rumija. It was rebuilt after the 1979 earthquake.

The olive groves. Olive trees cover the hillsides around the town: at one time there were up to a hundred thousand of them around Stari Bar, many of them centuries old.

In 2026 the ticket office was modernised, and equipment was added that uses augmented reality to explain the sites. According to local news reports, the hammam and the clock tower’s mechanism are being conserved, so parts of them may be fenced off.

Does Stari Bar get crowded?

Increasingly. About 500 people visited in 2004; in 2023 it was almost 142,000. Between 1 January and 20 September 2026 the count reached 147,724, up 19.5% on the same period of 2025. The growth comes from the cruise ships that call at the port of Bar.

In practice that means arriving for the 8:00 opening in summer, or coming a couple of hours before closing, rather than in the midday heat.

Where to eat: the bazaar and the Omerbašić mosque

Outside the gate is the Stari Bar čaršija, the old bazaar: a cobbled street of shops, cafés and restaurants that still looks Ottoman. There are around fifteen cafés and restaurants in Stari Bar altogether. On the bazaar, for example, the family-run Kaldrma has a roof terrace and plenty of vegetable dishes, and the konobas (taverns) serve lamb slow-cooked under a sač, an iron lid heaped with embers. Names and menus change, so look around when you get there. What to try in the country generally is in what to eat in Montenegro.

The Omerbašić mosque, built in 1662, stands about a hundred metres from the gate. It was built by the merchant Omer-baša and his sons, and today it is Bar’s central mosque.

Stara Maslina: the 2,000-year-old olive tree

The tree grows in the Mirovica district, beside the Bar–Ulcinj road, about 1.8 km from the gate of Stari Bar, or roughly half an hour on foot. It is more than two thousand years old: a sample of the trunk analysed in 2015 at the Faculty of Forestry of Istanbul University put its age at about 2,240 years. It is one of the oldest olive trees in the world, and in Bar they call it the oldest in Europe.

The state has protected it since 1957, and it has had a rough time: a fire in 1958, part of the trunk collapsing in 2004, and signs of drying out in 2023, after which specialists examined it and new drainage was put in. Tradition says feuding families came to make peace under the tree, which is how the district got its name, from the word for peace.

Entry is €2, and there is parking by the entrance. Sources give different opening hours, so the simple rule is: open during the day, and in summer until the evening.

Every November Stari Bar holds the Maslinijada, an olive festival with an olive-oil competition and a fair. The 2026 dates have not yet been announced.

How to get to Stari Bar

By car. From Budva it is about 41 km and an hour; from Podgorica about 57 km and an hour and ten minutes through the Sozina tunnel (€2.50 toll). The main car park by the entrance charges up to €1 an hour (€0.90 in summer, €0.60 in winter). In July and August allow half as long again for the drive, or even double. Car options are on the car rental in Bar page.

On foot from modern Bar. About 4 km uphill, 50 minutes to an hour. On a summer afternoon that is hard going.

By bus or taxi. A town bus runs from the station area, but irregularly: do not trust the timetable. If you take a taxi, agree the fare before you get in.

Can you visit on a tour?

The group tour “Shkodër and Stari Bar” costs from €53 per person from Budva, Kotor, Tivat or Bar. It runs in season, not from October to May, and goes back on sale in summer 2027. Group trips are listed on the tours page.

Stari Bar and the olive tree are also part of a private day along the south coast with Ulcinj and Velika Plaža: the Montenegrin coast tour.

Both are run by an organiser whose guides, on group and private tours alike, speak only Russian. If that rules them out for you, Stari Bar is easy to do on your own: the car park is by the entrance, and this page covers the rest.

What’s nearby?

• Ulcinj is 27 km from Bar, 35–40 minutes: Ulcinj and Velika Plaža.
• Lake Skadar: Virpazar is 40 minutes from Bar, Lake Skadar and the Crnojević river.
• From the water: a motorboat from Bar costs from €130 an hour for the whole boat and your group, see yacht charter.

Where Stari Bar fits into the country’s story is told in the history of Montenegro.

Prices and opening times checked in September 2026. Sources: Bar Cultural Centre (prices since 2024), Bar Tourist Organisation, Kuća maslina (the institution that looks after Stara Maslina), the local news outlets Primorski and Aktuelno, the Barinfo portal.