Mount Orjen, the limestone wall behind Herceg Novi

From the sea, Herceg Novi looks wedged between the water and a grey wall. That wall is Orjen, a limestone massif that, with Lovćen on the far side, forms a ring of mountains around the Bay of Kotor. It’s the perfect counterweight to the coast, and the tourist board rightly sells it as «two experiences in one day», sea in the morning and mountain in the afternoon.

A very young nature park

Orjen lies in Herceg Novi’s hinterland, hard up against the Croatian border to the west and Bosnia and Herzegovina to the north. After many attempts going back to Yugoslav times, Orjen Nature Park finally opened in 2018, mainly to protect its endemic plants. The star is the munika, a pine that thrives on limestone where little else grows, with some specimens reaching 650 years. Lower down, beech dominates, and the woods have spent half a century reclaiming ground once given over to grazing.

Stone everywhere

Don’t expect lakes, glaciers or jagged peaks. The tourist board itself describes a massif of stone plateaus, cracked rock and deep pits. Subra, at 1,679 m, forms a huge limestone amphitheatre considered the most striking feature of the coastal Dinarides, and at the park entrance Ljuti krš looks like a rippling sea of rock. Around the edges of the mountain are Illyrian burial mounds and forts, and Vranjaj cave holds Eneolithic remains. The most visible traces, though, come from centuries of summer grazing, with stone huts, terraced fields, an old windmill and, at Žukovica, a distillery roofed with a dry-stone dome. The upper stretch of the Austro-Hungarian military road from Vrbanj to the Orjen saddle is still in use, effectively an open-air museum of road building.

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The trails, from the archduke to today

The park has a dense network of waymarked paths. The most rewarding without being among the hardest climbs Veliki kabao, 1,894 m, the highest summit on the Adriatic coast. It was laid out for walks by the Austro-Hungarian heir Rudolf of Habsburg and is Montenegro’s oldest purpose-built hiking trail. From Vrbanj other paths lead to the Murišić cistern at Žukovica, the snow pit below Subra and the summer pastures of Vučji do, Poljica and Kamenska. The old Austro-Hungarian cart roads now make good mountain-bike routes.

At Vrbanj, 1,100 m up in beech forest, there’s an adventure park the tourist board ranks among the most modern in the region. Birdwatching, mountain running, paragliding, climbing and caving are on offer too.

Getting there and when to go

The park sits beside the Herceg Novi-Trebinje road, about twenty minutes by car from the coast road, or under two hours on foot along a waymarked path from the centre. The tourist board warns it isn’t a mountain for quick, easy access, and I’d take that seriously. Its page lists no entry fee. For a bed, the obvious base is one of the hotels in Herceg Novi.

So you do not lose the morning at the ticket office, browse tickets and tours in Orjen on GetYourGuide.

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