A Day Without a Rental Car: Seeing Bar Municipality by Taxi and on Foot

Renting a car feels like the default move when you land somewhere new, but in Bar municipality it's worth questioning that instinct. This is a compact, well-connected stretch of coast, and between walking the parts that are genuinely walkable and taking a taxi for the parts that aren't, you can see nearly everything on this list without ever dealing with a rental counter, a parking spot, or unfamiliar road signs.

The case against renting here

A rental car makes the most sense when you're covering long distances daily, parking is easy, and you want total flexibility on timing. None of that quite applies across Bar municipality. The whole coastal stretch from Utjeha to Sutomore is around 25 kilometers, short enough that a taxi between any two points rarely costs more than a modest sum, and parking in the older parts of town, especially up at Stari Bar, is limited and not particularly convenient. You also don't save meaningful money if you're only here a few days, once you factor in the rental fee itself, insurance, and fuel, against a handful of taxi rides taken only when you actually need them.

What you can walk

Start with what doesn't need a car or a taxi at all. Bar's town center, the promenade, the marina, the main shopping streets, is comfortably walkable, and so is Šušanj beach just south of it, close enough for most people staying centrally. The centers of Sutomore and Čanj are similarly walkable once you're actually in them, beach, restaurants, a short stroll through town.

What needs a taxi

Getting between towns is where a taxi replaces the car. Bar to Sutomore, Bar to Čanj, Bar up the hill to Stari Bar, none of these are realistic walks, especially in summer heat, and a taxi handles each of them in a matter of minutes for a modest fare. The same goes for reaching Virpazar on Lake Skadar, which is inland and a genuinely different kind of trip from anything on the coast, covered in full in our Skadar Lake day trip guide.

Beach-hopping across the quieter towns, Dobra Voda and Utjeha included, works the same way. Rather than driving yourself and worrying about where to leave the car at each stop, you get dropped exactly where you want to be and picked up again when you're ready. Our best beaches roundup covers all six coastal towns together if you're planning a few days of exactly this kind of hopping.

A sample two-day plan

Day one: walk Bar's town center in the morning, palace and old olive tree included, taxi up to Stari Bar for an hour or two among the ruins, taxi back down and walk to Šušanj for a late-afternoon swim.

Day two: taxi up the coast to Sutomore or Čanj for the morning, walk the beach and town center there, taxi onward or back for lunch, then either a second beach stop or a taxi out to Virpazar if you'd rather spend the afternoon on the lake instead of the sea.

Neither day involves more than two or three short taxi rides, and neither requires you to have ever driven in Montenegro at all.

Where this approach has limits

If you're planning to explore well beyond the municipality, further up or down the coast, into the mountains, or across the country over the course of a longer trip, a rental car (or a mix of longer arranged transfers) starts making more sense, and that's genuinely outside what a local taxi service is built for. Within Bar municipality specifically, though, the case for skipping the rental holds up.

Booking

Book each leg through the Greencar.me Taxi app, also on the App Store, as you go rather than trying to plan an entire multi-day itinerary of rides in advance. If you're just arriving and this is your first ride of the trip, our arrival guide from the port or town center to your hotel covers that first leg, and if you flew in, the airport transfers guide covers getting here in the first place.

For the fuller picture on pricing and the pickup zone across the municipality, see our local taxi guide overview.