5 Unique Things to Do on a Honeymoon in Montenegro (That Aren’t Just Beaches)

Every tour bus stops in Perast for 45 minutes to photograph Our Lady of the Rocks from a boat and then leaves. Don’t be on that bus.

Perast is one of the quietest, best-preserved baroque towns on the Adriatic, and it genuinely earns the word “romantic” without trying. There are maybe a dozen streets. Cats sleep on the church steps. The light on the bay at dusk looks absurd in the best way.

Book a room at Hotel Conte (a restored baroque palace right on the waterfront) and you’ll find the town considerably quieter after the day-trippers leave. Wake up early, walk to the water’s edge before breakfast, and you’ll have the whole bay quiet. That’s the version of Perast worth planning around.

This one surprises people. Lovćen is the mountain that looms over Kotor Bay, and most visitors stare up at it without ever going up. That’s a mistake.

The mausoleum at the summit holds Petar II Petrović-Njegoš - Montenegro’s poet-prince, a genuinely fascinating figure - and it was designed by Ivan Meštrović in a style that feels like ancient Greece collided with Yugoslavia. You climb 461 steps carved into the mountain to reach it. At the top, the view opens up in every direction: sea on one side, mountains on the other.

It’s not a typical honeymoon activity, I’ll admit. But there’s something about the scale of it. The effort of the climb, the silence at the top, the view… It all lands differently when you’re there with someone you love. Couples who do this tend to remember it more than the beaches.

These two belong together and almost nobody does them that way, or skips one of them entirely when visiting the Skadar lake area.

Start at Pavlova Strana. It’s a viewpoint that looks straight down at the Crnojevića River as it bends back on itself in a perfect horseshoe below - one of the most photographed views in the country, and completely free.

Then head down to Rijeka Crnojevića itself. The tiny settlement looks like a film set someone forgot to tear down. A stone arch bridge, an old mill, a handful of houses climbing the hillside, and almost complete silence. It was, for a short period, the old capital of medieval Zeta and home to the first printing press in the Balkans, though none of that really matters when you’re there. What matters is the light on the water, the stillness, and the fact that you’ll likely have it nearly to yourself.

Crno Jezero, the Black Lake, sits at the edge of town inside Durmitor National Park. The walk around it takes about an hour, it’s completely flat, and the scenery (glacial water, dense pine forest, the Durmitor massif rising behind it) looks nothing like the coast.