During his Grand Tour of Europe in the early 1800s, the flamboyant English poet Lord Byron declared: “At the birth of our planet, the most beautiful encounter between the land and the sea must have happened at the coast of Montenegro. When the pearls of nature were sown, handfuls of them were cast on this soil.”

The charms of Montenegro – among 21 countries that border the Mediterranean Sea – have not diminished over the centuries.