ADRIAN SIMPSON - MONTENEGRO
I
can vividly remember the moment I decided to buy a home in Montenegro. I saw a large
dilapidated building online in a place called
Risan in the Bay of Kotor with 12 bedrooms. It was like one of those glorious relics you see in France but right next to the crystal clear waters of the Adriatic. T e Bay of Kotor is absolutely stunning.
It’s Europe’s southernmost f ord and the mountains falling into the sea are quite spectacular – like the South of France, or Italy, just more beautiful. T e property was on sale with a guide
price of €250,000 in a country whose property market was just about beginning to explode, all for the cost of a small fl at in London. From that moment I set my heart on
living there and developing a property. All I needed to do was convince my wife Amy that it was the next step in our life together and get a plan worked out of how we were going to do it. It was January 2nd 2006 and I was 37
with an 18-month-old daughter Kit and another on the way. I had helped to run a property company
in the UK with friends in which our fi rst project was developing an old warehouse in Clerkenwell, whilst I was just starting in television as a presenter on Top Gear. From this I had also undertaken many
residential projects with Amy around south- west London. I had set about fi nding us a property adventure abroad, and it was mainly just for the adventure. I didn’t want to be amongst the golfi ng expats, I wanted to fi nd an interesting country where interesting people were going. And that bit certainly worked out. I researched everything – property prices,
fl ights, schools and began a dialogue with agents and ex-pats to try to build a picture of what we should be looking at. We had a budget of around €150,000 for the whole project and we wanted to be near life and most importantly near the sea. T ere was absolutely no point in going to Montenegro and not having a sea view. I also attended several seminars, which looking back were shamefully myopic in
their outlook: agencies peddling half truths and concealing facts to encourage wildly ill- considered property purchases by a British nation obsessed with making a quick buck from a place abroad. It was at the height of the overseas property boom aſt er all. So, having got together a list of contacts
and liaised with agents out there for a comprehensive tour of suitable properties, the three of us set off on July 16th for a ten- day visit that was to change the rest of our lives. T at last sentence is no exaggeration – what we experienced, how we coped and what we achieved will forever be a part of who we are. Landing at Dubrovnik, which is one
of three airports you can access the Bay of Kotor from (the other two being Tivat and Podgorica), it’s just a 16km drive to the Montenegro border, we were really hit by the heat: it was around 35 degrees and the hills that overlook the airport were scorched with that season’s wild fi res. T e next thing I remember remarking on
was how green it was - once we were driving through the fi rst valley that leads to the town of Herceg Novi on the gulf of Kotor - we were surrounded by wonderfully thick verdant vegetation, amazingly colourful fl owers and huge palm trees. And then I remember noticing the
guttering – it’s the kind of thing you do notice when you’re obsessed with buildings. It was the most spectacular I had ever seen, wonderfully sturdy construction, very oſt en made from copper. Having made these initial observations
and being of reasonably sound intellect – I still didn’t put two and two together, but I was to discover why everything was so green and why they have brilliant guttering, the hard way. I now know that this is because it rains
so much. In fact that’s doing it a little bit of a disservice: it absolutely lashes it down throughout the winter months and can quite happily keep raining biblically for weeks at a time.
Main:
Adriatic sea, Montenegro, Bay of Kotor. Perast town Below left to right:
Herceg Novi - the old city street
Handsome and sturdy copper guttering as seen in Herceg Novi
Europe’s southernmost f ord and the mountains falling into the sea are quite spectacular – like
the South of France, or Italy, just more beautiful.
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