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If too many cooks can spoil the broth, arguably, too many tourists can spoil the town, and sympathy for Budvans might not be so hard to muster up given the numbers of seasonal visitors, close on 100,000, ambling round what is still quite a small place. It’s not about bad tourists - beer swilling layabout Brits blissfully not in evidence for the early part of August 2011 - but just about so many of them, for whom you could hardly move. Still, summer Euros will be very welcome and seem to have been spent fairly well on a growing infrastructure, attracting not just budget holidaymakers but also the very wealthy, judging by some of the boats moored in the marina.
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| Adjacent to the harbour is the old town, neatly cobbled and intimately structured, full of traditional shops, cafes and restaurants which probably haven’t changed more than cosmetically for hundreds of years. It’s one of those places where getting lost is fun, and where you get a real sense of history, which in essence is very much in evidence anyway in that old Budva today is as Budva was generations ago.
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| The new town is for the most part a summer town, with the overwhelming majority of people there participating in one or more of the activities laid on for the incoming thousands. The beaches are full, but therefore popular, and the bars similarly cram customers in later in the evening as people wind down from a day diving, swimming, fishing, paragliding or whatever else. There’s a lot. Nightlife is limited to a few places which become equally claustrophobic in no time at all but nobody seems to mind and the atmosphere in Budva is relaxed right round the clock.
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| Real estate is reputedly very expensive but did not seem to be, certainly not when compared with Italy or Kazakhstan. Investing in older property probably requires a lot more capital and likely justfies the reputation (there are more millionaires per capita in Budva than anywhere else in Europe) but inland a bit, the modern ‘Italian style’ apartments seem to sell for prices typical of the rest of the continent.
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| Staff in shops and bars seemed to come from Serbia, and a few said they were just down for the summer, but nevertheless, local people were relatively friendly and given the similarity of their language to Russian, the masses of Russian tourists there, and the almost complete absence of those fluent in English, it was possible to get by using just Russian. Add to this the number of excursions leaving Budva daily for places such as
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| which were all conducted totally in Russian, it explains in part the popularity of the place with guests from the former Soviet Union. The other reason might just be that it’s a very nice place.
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