Side by side
| Budva | Petrovac | |
|---|---|---|
| Double room, August | €90 – €140 | €60 – €110 |
| Noise after midnight | Constant, all summer | Quiet by eleven |
| Beach | Imported gravel, packed | Red-pink pebble, room to sit |
| Old town | Walled, rebuilt after 1979 | None — a small square |
| Restaurants | Hundreds, wide range | Two dozen, mostly good |
| Nightlife | Among the loudest on the Adriatic | Two bars and the promenade |
| Beach club prices | €25 – €40 a pair | €15 – €25 |
| To Tivat airport | 35 min | 50 min |
Budva, honestly
Budva is the busiest resort in Montenegro and it earns that both ways. It has the walled old town, the widest choice of food, the boats, the water taxis, the beaches within walking distance, and everything is open until very late.
It is also genuinely loud. The clubs on the Slovenska plaža strip run until dawn from June to September, the old town bars until three, and the sound carries. An apartment with an old-town view is an apartment above a bar. People book it for the photograph and discover the soundtrack on the first night.
Petrovac, honestly
Petrovac is a small town round a bay, with a short promenade, a red-pink pebble beach, two Venetian islets offshore and a sixteenth-century fort at one end. It closes down by midnight and it is full of families and older couples who have been coming for twenty years.
It is also small. If two weeks of the same short promenade sounds narrow, it will be. The answer is that Budva is twenty minutes away when you want it and forty kilometres away when you do not.
The beaches
Petrovac's main beach is unusual on this coast: the pebble is reddish, the bay is shallow and sheltered, and there is actually space between the sunbed rows. Lučice, a ten-minute walk south through the pines, is a small cove that is better again. Buljarica, two kilometres north, is two kilometres of nearly undeveloped beach and the cheapest sunbeds on the coast.
Budva's town beach is imported gravel in front of the hotels and is crowded from June. Its good beaches — Mogren, Kamenovo — are a walk or a drive away and fill by eleven.
The third option nobody mentions
Bečići sits between them, two kilometres from Budva old town, with a two-kilometre beach and hotels rather than a town. Quieter than Budva, larger than Petrovac, and walkable to Budva along the seafront path in about half an hour. It is the compromise for a group that cannot agree.
For a first trip
Petrovac, and drive to Budva twice. It costs less, sleeps better, has the better beach, and puts you closer to Sveti Stefan, Bar and Ulcinj — which are the parts of this coast most people miss because they based themselves at the northern end of it.
