Budva is the undisputed capital of the Montenegrin summer. It's a small walled old town of golden stone that looks out over the Adriatic from a promontory, surrounded by beaches, hotels and nightlife that have made it famous across the Balkans. It's also one of the oldest towns on the Adriatic coast, with some 2,500 years of history going back to the Illyrians and Greek settlers. That contrast between ancient walls and trendy nightclubs defines Budva and explains its nickname, 'the Miami of the Adriatic'.
The plan here mixes culture and beach time. In the old town (Stari Grad), a maze of lanes leads to the Citadel (Citadela), the fortress above the sea with walls you can walk along. It also takes you to the churches of Santa Maria in Punta, St John and the Holy Trinity, and to little squares with cafés. Outside the walls are the long Slovenska beach and the pretty, tucked-away Mogren beach, reached by a path at the foot of the walls. Further on come the Riviera beaches (Bečići, Jaz). Next to the old town, on the rocks, the famous Ballerina statue has become the town's photo symbol, especially at sunset.
This guide takes a practical, honest look at Budva. It covers how to get there (via Tivat or Podgorica, or by bus from Kotor) and what beaches and sunloungers really cost. It also covers what to see in the old town and its Citadel, how to reach the best Riviera beaches (with the must-do stop at Sveti Stefan) and what the town's nightlife reputation is really like. Budva is ancient history, beach and party all at once, and the best base for discovering Montenegro's central coast.
Budva is one of the oldest towns on the Adriatic, with some 2,500 years of history. The site of the old town first held an Illyrian settlement. Later, between the 6th and 4th centuries BC, it became a Greek trading post (Butua), part of the Greek colonisation of the Adriatic, and one legend even links it to Cadmus, the founding hero of Thebes. In Roman times it was a municipality (oppidum civium Romanorum) whose inhabitants held citizenship. After Byzantium and several medieval kingdoms, it passed to the Republic of Venice, which ruled it from 1442 to 1797 and built most of the walls and buildings we see today. Then came the Austrian Empire, the brief Napoleonic period and Austria-Hungary again, until the town became part of Yugoslavia after the First World War. On 15 April 1979, a strong earthquake devastated the old town. The careful reconstruction took about eight years (until 1987) and gave the town back its original look, and today there are almost no visible traces of the disaster. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Montenegro's Adriatic coastline: Greek and Venetian towns, the island-hotel of Sveti Stefan and the Ottoman south around Ulcinj, with the country's longest sandy beach and a corsair past.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few Adriatic towns can boast as much antiquity as Budva. People have lived on the headland where the old town now stands for around 2,500 years, which makes it one of the oldest settlements on the whole Adriatic coast. A lovely Greek legend links its founding to Cadmus, the Phoenician-Theban hero who, exiled from Greece with his wife Harmonia, is said to have reached these shores and founded the city. The myth, recorded by ancient authors, gives Budva a legendary aura and highlights its deep Mediterranean roots.
Myth aside, archaeology confirms an Illyrian origin: the first inhabitants came from that world and made use of the defensible headland and its good anchorage. Between the 6th and 4th centuries BC, the town, then called Butua, was a trading post of Greek colonisation in the Adriatic, a place where goods and cultures met. The necropolises excavated in Budva have revealed rich grave goods from that period, with jewellery, pottery and Greek and Hellenistic objects that are now kept in museums and show how prosperous and well connected ancient Butua was. The town was born as a crossroads between the Illyrian and Greek worlds, and it never lost that knack for bringing people together.
As Rome expanded across the Adriatic, Butua became part of the Republic and later the Empire. By the middle of the 2nd century BC it was already a Roman oppidum with municipal government, and in time its inhabitants were granted citizenship. The sources call it an oppidum civium Romanorum, a community of Roman citizens, which was a privileged status. Under its Latin name, Butua, the town thrived as a port and as the centre of a farming region, with villas, baths and temples whose remains have been found. In late antiquity it was also the seat of a Christian bishop.
The fall of the Western Roman Empire and the invasions that followed brought centuries of turmoil. Budva fell within the orbit of the Byzantine Empire, which nominally ruled the coast, while Slavs and Avars were arriving in the Balkans. During the Middle Ages the town changed hands several times. It belonged to Slavic kingdoms and principalities on the coast (such as Duklja/Zeta), came under the influence of Byzantium and the Serbian kings, and remained a small seafaring town with its own statutes, its trade and a mix of Latin and Slavic people. Like its neighbours on the Bay of Kotor, Budva lived from the sea and from its location, always trying to keep a balance between the powers fighting over the Adriatic. In the mid-15th century that balance tipped towards the great maritime power of the day: the Republic of Venice.
In 1442 Budva placed itself under the sovereignty of the Republic of Venice, which ruled it for more than three centuries, until 1797. This is the period that gave the town its present-day look. As part of Venice's territories on the eastern Adriatic (known as Venetian Albania), Budva became a fortified frontier stronghold against the advancing Ottoman Empire, which controlled the interior. The Venetians built and strengthened the walls that still surround the old town, the Citadel and many of the stone buildings we admire today, giving it that unmistakable Venetian feel of narrow lanes, squares and churches.
Life under the Lion of St Mark was not easy. The town had to fend off attacks and live with the Turkish threat right on its border, and it also suffered epidemics and hardship. Still, it kept its maritime trade, its local institutions and its own identity, with a population that mixed Catholics and Orthodox Christians. In the old town, churches of both rites stand side by side as a reminder of that diversity: the ancient Santa María in Punta, the Catholic cathedral of San Iván and the Orthodox Holy Trinity. When Napoleon put an end to the Republic of Venice in 1797, Budva, like the rest of the Boka and the coast, entered a new cycle of foreign rule. It passed to the Austrian Empire, went through the Napoleonic period and the Illyrian Provinces, and after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 returned to Austria as part of the Kingdom of Dalmatia, where it remained until 1918.
After the First World War and the collapse of Austria-Hungary, Budva and Montenegro joined the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which would later become Yugoslavia. During the Second World War the town and the whole coast lived through Italian and German occupation and the Partisan struggle, hard years of war and want. The post-war period brought Tito's socialist Yugoslavia, and with it a change that would transform Budva's future: the growth of tourism.
From the 1950s and 1960s, the Montenegrin coast, and Budva in particular, began to take off as a holiday destination. Hotels and resorts went up, the beaches of the Riviera were developed, and tourists arrived from all over Yugoslavia and abroad. The nearby islet of Sveti Stefan became an exclusive, internationally famous hotel and a symbol of the coast's glamour. Budva grew into a tourism capital, combining its historic old town with an ever larger offer of sun, beaches and nightlife. That model was interrupted by the wars of the 1990s that broke up Yugoslavia and by the sanctions and crises of the time. It came back strongly after Montenegro's independence in 2006, making Budva the main engine of the country's tourism, with its upsides and downsides: prosperity and jobs, but also unchecked construction, summer crowds and high prices.
The most traumatic event in Budva's recent history came from the ground. On the morning of 15 April 1979, a violent earthquake of magnitude close to 7 shook the whole Montenegrin coast. Budva was one of the hardest-hit towns. The old town, with its centuries-old walls, churches and stone houses, was badly damaged, with buildings collapsed or on the verge of collapse. Around a hundred people died across the region, and the historic heritage suffered enormous losses. For a moment it seemed that the 2,500-year-old Butua might be lost.
The response was a long, painstaking reconstruction. For about eight years, until 1987, work went on to restore the old town to its original form, stone by stone, following the plans and the historic layout. The result was so careful that today there are hardly any visible traces of the disaster: anyone strolling through the Stari Grad would struggle to imagine that almost everything they see was restored after the quake. That effort saved the historic heart of the town.
Today Budva is Montenegro's tourism capital and one of its most visited destinations: an ancient old town, beaches for every taste along its Riviera (from urban Slovenska to charming Mogren, from festival-loving Jaz to family-friendly Bečići) and a nightlife that has earned it the nickname 'the Miami of the Adriatic'. Since independence in 2006 and the adoption of the euro, the town has thrown itself fully into tourism, facing the challenge of preserving its huge historic legacy and its surroundings against the pressure of new construction and overcrowding. Beneath the summer bustle there still beats one of the oldest towns on the Adriatic, founded, so the legend goes, by none other than Cadmus.
