Seventeen Baroque palaces on one street, two island churches in the bay
Perast is a Baroque jewel on the shore of the Bay of Kotor — a single waterfront street of 17 palazzi built by Venetian-era sea captains, with twin island churches visible from every window and the karst mountains of the Dinaric Alps rising directly behind. The town has no cars, roughly 400 permanent residents, and more palaces per metre of seafront than anywhere on the Adriatic. The island of Our Lady of the Rocks is an artificial one: local sailors began throwing stones into the shallows after a legendary icon of the Virgin was found on a rock in 1452, gradually building up an island over c…
Perast was a naval powerhouse of the Venetian Republic from the 14th to 18th centuries, maintaining a fleet of some 100 ships and sending its admirals to command warships across the Adriatic. The town's 17 Baroque palaces along a single waterfront street were funded by maritime trade, and its seamanship school educated Russian naval officers at the direct request of Peter the Great in the early 1700s. Perast passed to French then Austro-Hungarian control after Napoleon dissolved Venice in 1797, eventually joining Yugoslavia and becoming part of independent Montenegro in 2006.