Why there are so many
A walled port town on a trade route accumulates cats — ships carried them, the town needed them against rats in the grain stores, and the arrangement suited everybody for several centuries.
They became a symbol somewhere along the way. The cat appears on souvenirs, on shop signs, in the town's own marketing, and on a considerable share of the photographs taken here.
They are not abandoned
This is the thing worth knowing. Kotor's cats are community animals — fed by residents and shopkeepers on a rota that nobody formally organises, with water bowls put out in summer and boxes in winter.
A cat sleeping in a doorway is at home, not lost. It has three people who feed it and a preferred square.
The museum
Cats Museum Kotor, a small room off Trg od Oružja, holds a donated collection of cat-related prints, postcards, engravings and medals going back centuries. Entry is about a euro.
The point is not the collection. The takings go toward feeding and caring for the town's cats, and a separate local sterilisation initiative works to keep the population stable rather than growing unchecked. The euro is the actual product.
How to behave
- Do not feed them human food. Cooked fish bones, ham and cheese cause real problems and there is plenty of proper food going out daily.
- Do not pick them up. They are sociable and they are not pets.
- Do not take one home. People try. Montenegro has export requirements, rabies titre tests and quarantine considerations, and the cat has a life here.
- Water in August is the one thing that is always welcome. Bowls run dry.
Where they are
Trg od Oružja and the square by the Sea Gate for the sociable ones. The alleys behind St Luke's for the ones that want nothing to do with you. The steps up to the walls at dawn, where they sit on the warm stone. Around the fish market outside the walls, for obvious reasons.
Early morning is when they are most visible and most active, which is also the best hour to be in the old town for every other reason.
The wider point
Community cats exist across the Montenegrin coast, not only in Kotor. Budva, Perast, Herceg Novi and Ulcinj all have them, all fed the same informal way, and almost none of them have a funding mechanism as neat as a museum.
Local animal welfare organisations take donations and are chronically short. That is the version of this that is not a souvenir.
