Things to do
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Kotor City Walls and Fortress
A first-light start puts you on the ramparts before the heat, and at San Giovanni, the ruined fortress at the top, you look straight down on the old town's roofs.
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Cathedral of Saint Tryphon
Worth the short walk from the Square of Arms, Kotor's cathedral holds the relics of Saint Tryphon, the town's patron, in a treasury upstairs above a carved stone canopy over the main altar.
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Bay of Kotor
Six medieval towns sit on the shores of this one bay, and a single loop by road and ferry runs past most of them. Drive it in an afternoon, or give it two days and stop in each.
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Church of St Luke
From the door of this small Romanesque church on St Luke’s Square, you look straight down the nave to the altar end where, for a century and a half, Catholic and Orthodox rites were both served under one roof.
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Church of St. Nicholas
Between services you can step inside Kotor's principal Serbian Orthodox church and stand before an icon screen by a painter who had worked in the Czech lands and in Russia.
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Ladder of Kotor
The old mule track to the Lovćen villages climbs the mountain behind the town in more than seventy switchbacks, gaining about 940 metres over roughly six and a half kilometres to the Krstac pass on the Cetinje road. It is free, stony and mostly unshaded. The gap in the wall that once let walkers into the fortress has been sealed, so it no longer joins the walls climb. Carry water.
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Kotor Old Town
Kotor's old town is free to enter, so you can choose your hour: walk its squares and churches in the early morning or late afternoon, when the cruise crowds are gone.
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Church of the Birth of the Virgin Mary
Climb the staircase to the terrace first, then go inside for the altars. Prčanj is a small village with a very large church, paid for by its sea captains, and the balustrade looks out over the bay they sailed from.
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Kotor Fish Market
Right by the main car park, so it costs nothing extra to walk through before entering the walls.
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Maritime Museum
Stepping into this palace on the main square shows you Kotor's life as a port: portraits of its sea captains, scale models of their galleys and the weapons the town used against pirates.
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Cats Museum
A small collection on the square of Our Lady of the Angels holds cat postcards, prints, posters and coins from Kotor and far beyond. The old town's street cats are said to descend from ships' cats that came ashore in the bay, and they still sleep on its steps and window ledges. The ticket money goes to feeding and treating them. Half an hour covers it.
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Church of St Mary Collegiate
Built in 1221 beside the North Gate and the short Škurda river, this Catholic church is the quiet end of the old town. Twentieth century bronze doors in relief open onto fresco fragments, a large crucifix and the glass coffin of Blessed Osanna, a local anchoress who spent her life walled into a cell to pray. It is a short look in, best when no mass is on.
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Hotel Astoria
You wake inside Kotor's walls here, in a noble family's palace on Trg od pošte, and the old town's lanes start at the front door.
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Hotel Cattaro
On the Square of Arms, the first square inside Kotor's Sea Gate, Hotel Cattaro puts the old town at your door early in the morning, when its lanes are quietest.
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Hotel Forza Mare
Quiet and away from Kotor's walled centre, Hotel Forza Mare gives you a room at the water's edge in Dobrota, with the whole of the bay laid out in front of you.
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