Tivat is the most modern and glamorous face of the Bay of Kotor. It sits on a plain by the sea, a rarity on this coast of sheer mountains. The town changed radically when the old Yugoslav naval arsenal was turned into Porto Montenegro from 2009 onwards. Today it is a luxury superyacht marina with marble promenades, designer boutiques, restaurants, five-star hotels and even a naval museum with real submarines. Tivat is now the country's chicest destination, and its airport (TIV) is the gateway for anyone coming to discover Kotor, Perast or Budva.
Inevitably, the plan starts with Porto Montenegro. Stroll around the marina admiring spectacular yachts, have a drink on one of its terraces and visit the Naval Heritage Museum (Naval Heritage Collection). The museum is housed in a former sawmill and has more than 300 exhibits, plus two Yugoslav submarines you can walk through. But Tivat is more than luxury. It has authentic corners such as Gornja Lastva, a stone village in the mountains with views over the bay. On the nearby Luštica peninsula there are beaches with crystal-clear water, such as sandy Plavi Horizonti, and the peaceful Island of Flowers, with its monastery, sits just off the coast.
This guide takes a practical, honest look at Tivat. It covers how to use the airport as a base for the whole Boka, what to see in Porto Montenegro and what the naval museum really costs, and where to find the best beaches nearby. It also covers how to escape the luxury for Gornja Lastva and the Island of Flowers, and how to get around the bay by boat. Few towns combine Montenegro's most exclusive side with the quiet beauty of its World Heritage bay quite like Tivat.
Tivat has been settled since ancient times. The Illyrians and Romans lived in the area, and the neighbouring Prevlaka peninsula (Island of Flowers) was an important medieval religious centre, first with a Benedictine monastery and later an Orthodox one linked to the Serbian Church. For centuries it was a quiet farming and seafaring village on the bay, under Venetian rule (until 1797) and then Austro-Hungarian rule. The big change came with the navy. At the end of the 19th century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire built a major naval arsenal (Arsenal) in Tivat. The arsenal kept working in socialist Yugoslavia as a navy base and shipyard, with workshops, docks and even submarine tunnels. After the break-up of Yugoslavia and Montenegro's independence (2006), investors bought the declining arsenal and, from 2009, transformed it into Porto Montenegro, the luxury marina that redefined the town. Today Tivat combines that military and naval past, remembered in its museum and preserved submarines, with a present of high-end tourism. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Montenegro's Mediterranean fjord: centuries of Venetian rule, walled stone towns and a seafaring tradition that left behind captains, Baroque palaces and legends by the sea.
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No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Tivat holds an unusual spot on the Bay of Kotor: a fertile plain by the sea, something rare on a coast where the mountains usually drop straight into the water. That flat, sunny land, with good anchorages, drew settlers from very early times. The area was part of the Illyrian world, and a widely repeated tradition links the name Tivat to Teuta, the Illyrian queen of the 3rd century BC who ruled these shores from nearby Risan and whose piracy in the Adriatic sparked the Illyrian Wars against Rome. The exact origin of the name is disputed, but the link with that ancient world shows how far back people have lived here.
After the Roman conquest, the bay became part of the province of Dalmatia, and the Tivat plain, with its mild climate, was given over to farming: olive groves, vineyards and crops that made the most of the rare flat land. Villas and small settlements dotted the coast. With the fall of the Roman Empire and the arrival of the Slavs and Byzantines, the region came under the medieval kingdoms of the coast. For centuries Tivat stayed a quiet farming and seafaring village, in the shadow of the bay's more powerful towns, such as Kotor. But very close by, on a small peninsula, one of the most important religious centres in the region was about to emerge.
Just outside Tivat, on the small peninsula now called the Island of Flowers (Ostrvo cvijeća) or Prevlaka, one of the most important spiritual centres on the coast grew up in the Middle Ages. According to the sources, an ancient monastery stood there first, and in the 13th century the site became the seat of the Orthodox Eparchy (diocese) of Zeta, one of the founding dioceses of the Serbian Orthodox Church organised by Saint Sava. The Church of the Holy Trinity was built along with a monastic complex that was for a time a hub of religious and cultural power, with monks, scribes and pilgrims.
Prevlaka's history also has a dark, legendary chapter: tradition says that at some point between the 14th and 15th centuries, many of the monastery's monks were poisoned in a murky episode tied to the power struggles of the time, which left the place with a grim aura and earned it legends of a curse. The complex declined and was destroyed and rebuilt several times over the centuries, under Venetian and Ottoman rule. Even so, Prevlaka kept its sacred character, and today it still has a working Orthodox monastery and archaeological remains from that past. This religious link, together with the quiet farming life of the plain, defined Tivat for centuries, until a completely different role, a military one, changed its fate.
The big turning point in Tivat's history came at the end of the 19th century, and it came from the sea, but in military form. In 1815, after the Napoleonic Wars, the whole Bay of Kotor had passed to the Austrian Empire, later Austria-Hungary, which made it a key naval base on the Adriatic. Looking for flat land and sheltered water to set up workshops, docks and depots, the Austro-Hungarian navy chose the Tivat plain. Around 1889 construction began on the Arsenal, a large naval complex with shipyards, repair workshops, warehouses and docks, built to serve the imperial fleet.
The Arsenal completely transformed the small farming village. Tivat grew around the military installations, with new buildings, housing for workers and a population tied to the navy. The town went from living off olives and fishing to living off the navy. During the First World War, the Bay of Kotor and its naval base saw tensions and notable events, such as the Cattaro mutiny of 1918. When the war ended and Austria-Hungary broke up, in 1918 Tivat and the rest of the Boka joined the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which would become Yugoslavia. Far from closing, the Arsenal changed flags and remained a key part of the new navy.
For most of the 20th century, Tivat was above all a Yugoslav navy town. The Arsenal inherited from the Austro-Hungarians became one of the main shipyards and repair bases of the Yugoslav Navy (JRM). Warships were repaired and maintained there, and the town lived largely off military and naval jobs. The Bay of Kotor, with its deep, sheltered water and steep slopes, was ideal for military installations: tunnels were even dug into the rock in the area to shelter submarines and attack boats, and some of them can still be seen.
The two submarines that are now the highlight of Tivat's naval museum date from that time: the P-821 Heroj, a diesel-electric submarine, and the small P-912 Una, both examples of Yugoslav naval engineering. The Second World War had brought Italian and German occupation and the partisan struggle to the bay; the socialist post-war years brought decades of military and industrial activity around the Arsenal. Tivat was a town of naval workers and sailors, proud of its strategic role but also shaped by it: much of its land and daily life revolved around a closed military zone. When Yugoslavia began to break apart in the 1990s, amid wars and sanctions, the old Arsenal fell into crisis and decline, dragging the town's economy down with it. The future of that huge and increasingly outdated naval site was left up in the air.
Montenegro's independence in 2006 came just as a new purpose was being sought for Tivat's run-down Arsenal. The answer was radical: turn the former military base into a luxury tourism project. A group of international investors, led by Canadian tycoon Peter Munk, with partners such as the Rothschild family and others, bought the land and, from 2009, built Porto Montenegro, a top-end superyacht marina on the site of the old Arsenal. Where there had once been military workshops and warships, there were now berths for large yachts, pale stone promenades, luxury brand boutiques, restaurants, a yacht club and five-star hotels.
The change was dramatic and not without debate: in just a few years, a town with a working-class and military tradition became the country's most glamorous destination, drawing high-spending visitors and sending prices soaring. Part of the site's memory was saved in the Naval Heritage Museum, housed in a former sawmill inside the marina itself, with the submarines and hundreds of objects recalling Tivat's past. Today the town lives this double identity: the luxury of Porto Montenegro and its more authentic, peaceful corners, such as the mountain village of Gornja Lastva, the beaches of Luštica or the quiet Island of Flowers with its old monastery. Tivat is also the bay's gateway by air thanks to its airport. From Illyrian queen to imperial arsenal, from submarine base to superyacht marina, the history of this plain by the sea is perhaps the most changeable in the whole Boka Kotorska.
