Family multi activity vacation in Montenegro

Planet

We want our vacations to be high impact in experience but low impact on the environment! Once you are at Villa Miela, transport will be mostly on foot, kayak or bike, with car transfers provided to starting points for excursions or restaurants if needed.

Lake Skadar is a National Park and a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance. As such, our tour guides will ensure you pay all relevant National Park fees and encourage you to behave in an eco-friendly manner at all times by supporting the Leave No Trace principles –traveling on marked paths, disposing of waste properly, leaving what you find (unless it’s other people’s rubbish!), respecting wildlife and being considerate of other visitors and the local community.

We are committed to local conservation projects and have contributed actively as well as financially to local initiatives, most notably a CZIP (Montenegrin RSPB) project to help repair and maintain nesting rafts for the local, endangered Dalmatian Pelican colony. As the leading sustainable tour operator in the country, it is up to us to lead by example, protecting the National Parks from over-development and ensuring their beauty can be enjoyed by the next generation.

Your accommodation also respects the environment. With metre-thick stone walls, built before air-conditioning was invented as the traditional Mediterranean way of keeping cool, air-conditioning is neither needed, nor provided. Instead, electric fans are available for occasional use if the naturally cool interior needs a little help in the hottest weeks. To keep emissions down, guests are asked to turn off all electric fans/lights on leaving the room. Guests are also requested to keep water use to a minimum, especially important during the dry summer months. The village has no mains water connection and Villa Miela's water reservoir, fed by mountain-spring, needs careful management during the long dry summer.

While in Montenegro, we preference low or no carbon impact activities like hiking & kayaking, slow travel, while at our activity base, we use LED lights, fans instead of AC and provide a zero mile breakfast basket.

People

We've built strong links with local communities at Lake Skadar and support their maintenance of historic traditions, from bee-keeping, fishing and carp-smoking to the making of wine, cheese, olive-oil and flavoured brandies. By visiting home-producers and buying their wares, you will build pride, contribute to the local economy and encourage the development of and investment in sustainable agro-tourism. Along the way, you'll meet local people like Ivo Ukšanovic and his wife Radmila who produce award-winning wine, just 1000 barrels a year, using traditional techniques and no artificial additives. English isn’t widely spoken around the lake, but your guides will be able to translate to make each interaction memorable and meaningful for you and your host community. Your visit, and National Park fees, really count in a remote, beautiful and unknown Balkan destination which is still suffering from decades of impoverishment caused by urban migration and the 1990s Yugoslavian war.

Every year we are actively involved in clean-up operations both on the lake and in the National Park at large. We have campaigned for and obtained several large refuse containers for villages that had previously had no way to dispose of their garbage, and every spring we help to clear hiking trails so that remote villages can also benefit from the growing tourism industry.

Your accommodation at Villa Miela has also been sensitively restored to conserve an example of traditional local architecture, drawing praise from the local community (and many visitors!). Historic features have been preserved, such as the solid stone archway in the "konoba" (ground floor), once used for storing wine and smoking hams and carp, or the tiny original windows which help maintain a naturally cool interior. As the first such renovation in the area, it is hoped that the Villa will encourage more regeneration along these lines and deter less scrupulous investors from knocking down such buildings and replacing them with cheaper concrete structures.