Tivat is a coastal town in southwest Montenegro with about 14,000 inhabitants, located in the central part of the Bay of Kotor (Boka Kotorska, or just “Boka”) by the Adriatic Sea, 80km from Dubrovnik.
The main attractions are the beautiful sandy beach at Plavi Horizonti, the islands of Sveti Marko & Prevlaka and the botanic garden filled with plants that were gifts from Bokan sailors who brought back exotic trees and plants from their voyages.
Sveti Marko is entirely covered with greenery. A tourist settlement with 500 Tahiti-style houses was built there some 50 years ago, but now it is mostly abandoned, making it a quite exotic and mysterious destination.
Prevlaka, or the Island of Flowers, is connected with the mainland by a narrow isthmus (a strip of narrow land), inhabited by about a hundred people. The island has a monastery dedicated to Archangel Michael, built in the early 13th. It used to be a tourist resort for Yugoslav military personnel, but now it’s open for all.
Due to its beautiful location in the southern Adriatic Sea, Tivat has for a long time been a popular docking spot for sail boats and yachts and is now starting to become a major nautical tourism center.
In 2007, private investors purchased a shipyard and former military base, with the goal to build Porto Montenegro, a superyacht marina that would become “the new Monaco”.
The first phase was ready in 2010, not this glamourous 24-hectare town-within-a-town includes upmarket apartment buildings, high-end boutiques, restaurants and leisure facilities, bars, nightclub a museum, a resort hotel and berths for 450 yachts.
Open to the public, this is a very nice location to stroll, have a meal and ogle yachts. For the kids there’s also a playground shaped like a pirate ship near the maritime museum.
Prices are generally geared more towards crew-members than yacht owners, so even if it’s a bit expensive for Montenegro, prices are reasonable by European standards.
Montenegro uses the Euro. Most places will accept Visa and Mastercard credit cards.
The easiest way to get to Tivat is to fly directly to Tivat Airport (TIV), situated 3 km (1.9 mi) south of the city center.