The inner Balkans: From Sarajevo to Kotor

When to go

May to June and September to October. In July and August Mostar is among the hottest towns in the Balkans, often near forty degrees, the border queues to Croatia and Montenegro run for hours, and cruise ships fill Dubrovnik and Kotor by mid-morning. In winter Sarajevo is cold and snowy, and the road down the Neretva can be icy. In autumn the sea is still warm and the crowds have gone.

The stops

Interactive map of the route on our site ›

1. Sarajevo2 nights

   Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain reached Sarajevo by 1565, and the Old Synagogue they built in 1581 near the bazaar is now the Museum of the Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The National Museum keeps the Sarajevo Haggadah, illuminated in Spain in the fourteenth century; in the Second World War its Muslim librarian, Derviš Korkut, smuggled it out of the Germans’ reach and hid it in the mountains. A street corner by the Latin Bridge marks where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in 1914.

2. Konjicstop on the way

   A small town on the Neretva with a stone Ottoman bridge of 1682, blown up by the retreating Germans in 1945 and rebuilt in 2009. In the hills nearby Tito had a nuclear bunker built in secret for himself and his government, which can now be visited by booking ahead.

3. Jablanica Bridgestop on the way

   In 1943, in the Battle of the Neretva, Tito’s partisans blew up the railway bridge here to escape the Germans and their allies, carrying their wounded across a makeshift crossing. The broken steel bridge that hangs into the river today was blown up again in 1968 for the film The Battle of Neretva, with Yul Brynner, and left as a memorial.

4. Mostar2 nights

   The Old Bridge was built in 1566 by the Ottoman architect Mimar Hayruddin, a single stone arch over the Neretva. It was shelled and destroyed in November 1993, during the war, and rebuilt with stone from the same quarry, reopening in 2004; young men of the town still dive from it into the cold river for tips.

5. Blagaj Tekkestop on the way

   A dervish house of the Ottoman period built at the foot of a cliff, beside the cave where the Buna river comes out of the rock, among the largest karst springs in Europe. You can drink coffee on the terrace over the green water, and visitors to the house are lent a covering at the door.

6. Počiteljstop on the way

   A walled Ottoman village climbing a hillside over the Neretva, with a mosque of 1563 and a tower at the top. The mosque was badly damaged in 1993 and has been restored; for decades the village was a colony for painters.

7. Kravice Fallsstop on the way

   The Trebižat river falls over a wide crescent of travertine about twenty-five metres high into a green pool where swimming is allowed. In spring the water thunders; by late summer it is calmer and the pool is full of bathers.

8. Neumstop on the way

   The only town on Bosnia’s short stretch of coast, a strip left to Bosnia by old borders that goes back to the Republic of Ragusa, which gave it to the Ottomans in 1699 as a buffer against Venice. Prices in its shops are lower than in Croatia on either side, and coaches stop here for that reason.

9. Stonone night

   A defensive wall five and a half kilometres long runs over the hills here, the longest in Europe after Hadrian’s, and it was not built to protect a city. It was built to protect salt. The pans below it have been worked by hand since the fourteenth century and they still are, and salt was what made Dubrovnik rich.

10. Trsteno Arboretumstop on the way

    A Renaissance garden laid out at the end of the fifteenth century by the Gučetić, a noble family of Dubrovnik, on a terrace over the sea. In the village square stand two oriental plane trees more than four hundred years old, and the garden played the palace gardens of King’s Landing in Game of Thrones.

11. Dubrovnik2 nights

    The walls run almost two kilometres around the old town, and you can walk their whole top. The Republic of Ragusa banned the slave trade in 1416. On Žudioska, the Jewish street, a synagogue on an upper floor, founded in the fourteenth century, is among the oldest in Europe still in use; its Torah scrolls came, by tradition, with Jews expelled from Spain.

12. Trebinjestop on the way

    A Herzegovinian town half an hour inland from Dubrovnik, with a market square under old plane trees and wineries in the hills. The Ottoman Arslanagić Bridge of 1574 was taken apart stone by stone in the 1970s, when a dam was to flood its site, and rebuilt downstream.

13. Herceg Novistop on the way

    Founded in 1382 by the Bosnian king Tvrtko I as a fortress and salt market at the mouth of the Bay of Kotor. In 1539 an Ottoman army and fleet besieged the Spanish garrison that had taken the town the year before, and almost none of the defenders survived.

14. Peraststop on the way

    A village of Baroque captains’ houses on the Bay of Kotor, facing two islets. Our Lady of the Rocks is an artificial island raised by local sailors who dropped stones and sunken ships on a reef, and every 22 July the people of Perast still row out at dusk to throw stones around it. Peter the Great sent Russian nobles here to study navigation.

15. Kotorone night

    A walled Venetian town at the far end of the bay, a World Heritage site since 1979, with walls that climb the mountain behind it to the fortress of San Giovanni. The bay is often called a fjord, but it is a drowned river canyon; the town is known for its many cats, and has a cat museum.

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Whole routes, with a room up to $80 at every stop.

To the routes

What it costs

Eighty dollars a night is the room. The car, the fuel and the tolls are yours: the short sections of motorway in Bosnia are tolled, paid at the booth, while the main roads through Herzegovina, along the Croatian coast and around the Bay of Kotor are free. The rental company charges a fee for taking the car across the borders, and a much larger one if you leave it in Montenegro and fly home from there. Parking in Dubrovnik near the old town and in Kotor is paid and expensive. Bosnia uses the convertible mark; Croatia and Montenegro use the euro.

What to know

Three things. One: the rental papers. Tell the rental company when you book that the car will cross into Croatia and Montenegro; it must give you written permission and a green card, the international insurance certificate, covering Bosnia, Croatia and Montenegro. Without them the border police can turn you back, and outside the countries on the card you are not insured. Two: the borders. This route crosses at least three of them, and Croatia is in the Schengen area, so leaving and entering it means a full passport check on both sides; in summer the queue can take an hour or more. Three: the Neum corridor. Near Neum, Bosnia reaches the sea for some twenty kilometres and cuts the Croatian coast in two. The old coast road passes through it, with a border post at each end; since 2022 the Pelješac Bridge lets you go around it inside Croatia, but on this route you drive through, so keep the passports at hand.

Roads, tolls and rules

All three countries drive on the right. From Sarajevo the road follows the Neretva down through its gorges to Mostar and the coast, a beautiful road of tunnels and bends where lorries are slow to pass. In Bosnia dipped headlights must be on by day. The coast road from Dubrovnik to Kotor is short on the map, but the queue at the Montenegrin border and the narrow road around the bay make it half a day. A night in Ston, on the salt pans at the root of the Peljesac peninsula, breaks the drive from Mostar to Dubrovnik, so no day on this route is longer than about 130 kilometres.

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