On the Rise
The Adriatic has its loud addresses. Porto Montenegro, twenty minutes north across the water at Tivat, sells superyachts and a certain hard gleam, and it sells them well. Lustica Bay wants a slower thing. It sits on the seaward side of the peninsula that gives it its name, on Trašte Bay, with the folded green of the Bay of Kotor and its UNESCO water at its back. We arrived expecting a resort and found something closer to a town being built one honest phase at a time.
The scale is real and worth stating plainly. Six hundred and ninety hectares of the Luštica peninsula, of which the developer keeps roughly nine parts in ten as open ground, olive terrace and macchia and pale rock running down to about six kilometres of coast. The company behind it, Luštica Development AD, is ninety per cent Orascom and ten per cent the Montenegrin state. That partnership explains both the patience of the thing and the money behind it.
What already exists you can walk in an afternoon. The Chedi opened on the marina promenade in 2019, a hundred and eleven rooms in low grey stone, five stars worn without noise. The marina beneath it holds a hundred and fifteen berths and takes yachts up to forty-five metres, with room to grow toward a hundred and seventy-six as the later phases land. Boats come and go. Nobody hurries them.
This is not a place that has arrived. It is a place still deciding what it will be, and that, for now, is the whole pleasure of it.
Inland sits Centrale, the town's working heart, and it is the part that convinces us most. A second hotel, apartments, a school, a small market, streets drawn to be used in February as much as in August. Montenegro has no shortage of summer facades that shutter in October. A year-round community is the harder, better ambition, and Lustica Bay seems to mean it.
The next chapter climbs the hill. Gary Player has routed a championship course above the bay, the first nine holes due this year and the full eighteen by 2028, every fairway turned toward the water. Whether the coast needs another golf course is a fair question. Whether it will draw a certain traveller down from Croatia and hold him is less in doubt.
We would not send everyone yet. Half of Lustica Bay is still a promise and a crane, and the polish can read a little corporate up close. But the bones are good, the sea is the clean cold blue that Montenegro does better than almost anywhere, and the restraint, so far, is real. Go while it is half-finished. That is often when a place is most itself.
