Ninety seconds on Besac Fortress
Go up before booking a boat. The courtyard looks over the whole northern arm of the lake, so half a day on the water stops being a guess.
A small Ottoman fort built in 1478 on the hill directly above Virpazar, controlling the approach to Lake Skadar. Its walls and towers survive and enclose a courtyard with an open view over the lake's northern arm.
The view arrives before the walls do. From the courtyard the lake opens out, with the Crmnica basin falling away inland and the twin peaks of Vranjina across the water. A restaurant operates inside the fortress, which is unusual for a hilltop ruin in this country and explains the furniture in the courtyard; there is a wine museum with it. Twenty minutes is enough for the walls themselves. What the height gives is the shape of the lake before a boat reduces it to reeds and one channel.
It stayed part of the lake's chain of defences for centuries after it went up. Its last working use was as a prison in the Second World War. The walls standing today are a recent reconstruction, paid for with European and World Bank money.
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