Vacancy

I found this one by accident. I was exploring Montenegro with no fixed plan — the way the best trips go — when the trees opened on the coast road and there it was: a whole resort built in terraces down the slope to the Adriatic, huge, far bigger than it has any right to be, every level a row of identical rooms and every room a perfect rectangle of sea where the glass used to be.

It was somebody’s idea of paradise once. You can feel the optimism in the plan: hundreds of beds stacked toward the water, balconies cantilevered so nobody would have to look at anything but the horizon. Then the money or the decade turned and it was simply switched off — not demolished, not finished, just left, like everyone walked out between breakfast and lunch and never came back.

What I didn’t expect was how much it would feel like climbing. The place is enormous, and you move through it the way you’d move up a cliff face — up the open stairwells, along the colonnades, out onto ledges with nothing between you and the drop. I spend a lot of time in real mountains; this was the same instinct, the same focus, except the rock was poured concrete and the summit was a balcony over the sea.

It was the closest thing to mountaineering I’ve done indoors. Concrete instead of stone — and at the top of every pitch, the Adriatic, wide open.

I walked the ground-floor colonnades where the columns march straight at the water, my footsteps the only sound that wasn’t waves. Upstairs the rooms have gone feral — flaking render, drifts of leaves, the odd mattress fossilising in a corner — but each one still does its job. You stand in a doorway, the far wall just gone, and there’s the whole bay, blue to the point of absurdity, framed in raw concrete.

Standing on the edge

The best part is exactly that: finding an open edge, sitting down with your legs over it, and watching the sea do nothing in particular for as long as you like. The walls carry decades of graffiti in three alphabets, and near the stairs someone had painted renovation in progress — a joke years stale, still funnier than it should be.

These coastal ruins don’t feel haunted so much as paused. The sea keeps arriving, indifferent and beautiful, and the building keeps offering it up through five hundred empty frames. I stayed until the light went gold, then climbed back down my concrete mountain and let the resort fold into the hillside — terrace by terrace, every room still watching the water.