Dusan Varda recalls strolling through the Old City of Kotor one late-autumn evening last year.

“There was almost no one but waiters in smoothly ironed uniforms in empty, now mainly luxurious restaurants – this is now the typical image of Kotor in the off-season,” he said, lamenting what has become of this walled city and its Venetian palaces in Montenegro’s fjord-like Bay of Kotor.

“I feel nostalgic for the Kotor of five, 10, 20 years ago,” Varda said.

Kotor feels abandoned in the off-season because everything is geared for spring and summer when the cruise ships arrive, disgorging thousands of tourists who each spend an estimated average of 40 euros per day in the city.

But beyond the impact on Kotor itself, Varda, as director of the Mediterranean Centre for Environmental Monitoring, MedCEM, in the Montenegrin port city of Bar, worries most about the bay itself, the water that laps its shores and its delicate ecosystem. It’s not only tourists that pour off the ships.

With cash filling city coffers, environmental experts and activists say authorities are blind to the side-effects – noise, air and sea pollution.

Kotor ranks third in the Mediterranean in terms of cruise ship visits behind Venice and Dubrovnik, which have long since surrendered to mass tourism, driving out local residents.

In interviews for Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, and the Centre for Investigative Journalism of Montenegro, CIN-CG, they have called on authorities to conduct an urgent assessment of the impact of cruise ships on the environment, regulate their presence in the Bay of Kotor and designate certain areas as off-limits.

Western countries “realised their tourism mistakes long ago” and banned cruise ships from designated protected areas, said Varda.

As a first step, he said, Kotor should follow Croatia’s Dubrovnik in limiting the number of cruise ships allowed to dock in its waters.

“The problem is the arbitrary way in which tourism is developed in Montenegro,” he told BIRN/CIN-CG.

“We must not wait for the total collapse of natural and municipal capacities to realise that it is necessary to implement some restrictions.”

Current monitoring “not enough”