The Bay of Kotor, and whether it counts as a fjord

Sail into the Bay of Kotor and it is easy to see why the word "fjord" gets reached for. Steep grey mountains rise almost directly from still, deep water, the bay narrows and turns sharply enough that the way ahead is not always obvious, and small stone towns cling to whatever flat ground exists between the water and the slopes. It looks, in every visual respect a traveller might reasonably judge by, exactly like the fjords of Norway or New Zealand. Geologically, it is something slightly different: not a valley carved by a glacier and later flooded by the sea, but a canyon cut by a river, subsequently drowned as sea levels rose after the last ice age. The technical term is a "ria" rather than a fjord, and while the distinction rarely troubles anyone actually looking at the view, it is worth knowing before repeating the more common claim too confidently at dinner.

Whatever the geology is called, the bay's shape has mattered enormously to the people who have lived around it. Its narrow entrance and the sharply enclosed inner basin around Kotor itself made it an unusually defensible natural harbour, sheltered from Adriatic storms and difficult for a hostile fleet to approach without warning. Venice held this stretch of coast for centuries, valuing it for exactly that reason, and Kotor's old town still carries the fortifications, in places climbing over a thousand metres up the mountainside behind it, that Venetian and later Austro-Hungarian engineers built to protect the bay's innermost anchorage.

The bay's four connected basins, linked by narrower straits at Verige and elsewhere, effectively formed a series of natural chokepoints that a defending force could hold with relatively few men against a much larger attacker approaching from the sea. That same geography, cutting the bay off from easy overland travel on three sides, is why towns like Perast, Risan and Herceg Novi developed as largely self-contained maritime communities, each with its own church, its own captains and, in Perast's case, a period of genuine prosperity built on a merchant fleet that traded well beyond the Adriatic.

Perast, and two islands nobody explains without a story

Midway along the bay, the small town of Perast faces two tiny islands that between them account for a disproportionate share of the Bay of Kotor's postcards. Sveti Đorđe, a natural islet with a Benedictine monastery, sits opposite Gospa od Škrpjela, "Our Lady of the Rocks", which is not natural at all: local tradition holds that it was built up gradually by sailors depositing stones on a rocky outcrop after a vow, following the discovery of a religious icon on the site in the fifteenth century, a custom said to have continued for centuries afterward. Whatever the precise truth of the founding legend, the island and its church are real enough, and the small museum inside holds paintings and embroidery, including a piece reportedly worked in part with the hair of the woman who made it as her eyesight failed over decades of stitching.

Kotor itself, at the end of the approach

At the innermost point of the bay, Kotor's old town sits within walls that snake up the mountainside behind it towards the Fortress of St John, a strenuous but rewarding climb of well over a thousand steps for anyone inclined to look down on the whole approach from above rather than simply admire it from the water. The town's cathedral of St Tryphon, consecrated in the twelfth century and rebuilt more than once after earthquakes, including a serious one in 1979 that damaged much of the old town, anchors a warren of narrow marble streets that a cruise call typically allows a few hours to explore, rarely quite enough.

Whether the bay is technically a fjord or not, arriving by sea remains the way to appreciate it properly: the mountains close in gradually, the water stays glassy in the bay's more sheltered stretches, and Kotor, when it finally appears at the end of the approach, has had every advantage of drama built into the geography leading up to it.