For the place
Lazure Hotel & Marina
Herceg Novi · Montenegro
At the throat of the Bay of Kotor, in the village of Meljine, a run of Venetian stone was built in the early 1730s for a single purpose: to keep sickness out. This was a lazaret, a quarantine station, and it is now a hotel.
Venice took Herceg Novi from the Ottomans in 1687 and ran it as a customs port, which meant ships, merchants and whatever travelled in their holds. To stand between the trade and the town, the Republic built a quarantine station at Meljine between 1729 and 1732: a walled compound with two piers and a breakwater, where arrivals waited out their days before they were let ashore. The place prospered on it and became the health office for the whole of Boka. What survives has been restored and extended into Lazure, a five-star hotel wrapped around its own marina, water on one side and the bare grey slopes of Orjen behind. The oldest rooms, twenty-four of them in the Historic Building, keep the thick walls and a plain, rustic hand; a larger residential wing holds the rest. On the grounds there is still a small chapel to St Rocco, the saint people once invoked against the plague.
Two restaurants face the marina. Rosemarine is the more ambitious, a Mediterranean kitchen that lets Adriatic fish and Montenegrin produce take an accent from further east, with saffron, spice, raw-fish plates and handmade pasta. Augusto is the easier of the pair, set on a terrace over the water. Rocco, the lounge bar, carries the evening. In summer the hotel opens a bar on its own sandstone beach.
People call Boka a fjord. It is not one, though the shape misleads: a deep inlet folding back on itself under bare mountains, Kotor and Perast waiting further in. Most of its hotels are restored palazzi in the old towns. Lazure is rarer, a working piece of the bay's quarantine past given back a use, and the marina in front of it is the reason to choose it, deep enough for a thirty-metre yacht to tie up where sailing ships once sat out their forty days. Tivat airport is twenty minutes away, Dubrovnik about forty. Come for the water and the walls, not for a small hideaway; this is a large hotel, and honest about it.
