Kotor

The Boka is what happens when the Adriatic decides to enter the mountains and stay: a drowned river canyon wearing the costume of a fjord, folding twice before it reaches Kotor, hidden at the bottom like a secret the sea keeps. The town is a triangle of medieval stone wedged between the water and a cliff, with walls that do something walls elsewhere don't — they climb.

The sensible traveller walks the marble lanes early, before the cruise bells; pays the cathedral of St Tryphon its visit; then takes the serpentine wall up to San Giovanni — 1,350 steps, a fortress, and the bay below arranging itself into the Mediterranean's best-kept view. The afternoon belongs to the water: a boat to Perast and Our Lady of the Rocks, the island Kotor's sailors built stone by stone, dropping a rock each voyage until an island existed.

The Guide's honesty: the wall climb in July is a pilgrimage of sweat — go at eight or at five, carry water, wear soles that grip —; the bay is calm but the road around it is narrow and shared with buses: the boat is the civilized route; and when the cruise ships call, the old town holds its breath — Perast, twenty minutes up the shore, never does.