Montenegro - close and far at the same time

In theory, only a few hours of sailing separate the southern coasts of the Adriatic Sea. In practice, it takes almost a whole day to get from Puglia to the Balkan country. This situation is detrimental to the economies of both sides.

Puglia and Montenegro were much closer than the 120 miles separating the port of Bari from the port of Bar. Until the early 2000s, the Puglia prosecutor's office claimed that then-Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic was involved in smuggling cigarettes from the Balkans to Italy. This position was shelved after the country gained independence and Italian judges recognized his diplomatic immunity. At the time, Marko Vesovic, today's head of the online edition of state television Rtcg, was working as a correspondent for the Dan newspaper. He was one of the few Montenegrin journalists who fully followed the trials, which involved some of his country's political and business elite. "I have been to Bari twenty-seven times," he recounts. It's supposed to be a relaxed trip. Half an hour by plane from the capital Podgorica, where Vesovic lives, or an overnight crossing by sea. But in practice, such routes do not exist. Twenty-seven times Vesovic has had to travel to the port of Durraso in Albania - four hours by car, which doubles during high season, and then another ten hours by ferry. There and back. "There have been times when I've been informed of a canceled hearing right after sailing. Two days at sea for nothing, just thrown away. It's on occasions like that that you realize how isolated the place you live in is."

Lack of connections is not only an inconvenience for those who, like Vesovic, have to move between the two shores of the Southern Adriatic Sea for various reasons. Isolation is a significant problem for a country like Montenegro. More than a third of its gross domestic product depends on tourism, which led to economic collapse during the closures imposed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. The transportation issue is central to the national political debate, so much so that after the 2020 elections, the government decided to merge the transport and energy ministries into a single agency, the capital investment department, to create a single team responsible for implementing what are considered strategic infrastructure projects. These include the controversial highway, financed by a Chinese loan, connecting the port of Bar to Serbia, strengthening the railroad parallel to it to Belgrade and integrating the national electricity grid with Italy and the Eastern Balkans.

Transnational region. Europe is also contributing to infrastructure development in Montenegro. It is doing so through the Instrument for Pre-Accession (IPP), a fund used to promote the integration of EU candidates. Between 2014 and 2020, the Italy-Albania-Montenegro Interreg PPI program received about 92 million euros. It was recently extended for the next seven years, receiving 80 million euros in funding and changing its name to Interreg IPP South Adriatic, hinting at the creation of a transnational European region. Interreg aims to reduce the influence of national borders and promote equitable economic, social and cultural development throughout the European Union. It may also include EU candidates and is supported by European cohesion policy instruments, notably the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). One of the axes of the Interreg IPP Italy-Albania-Montenegro program is transport and the Almonite ITC (Albania, Montenegro, Italy, multimodal transport link) was the most important infrastructure project developed by the committee chairing this interregional program.

There are no doubts about the usefulness of a summer connection between Puglia and Montenegro. The first part of the project envisioned that the sea routes from Termoli to Bar in Montenegro and from Bari to Bar via Shengjin in Albania would operate all year round. "The Puglia region was the body that promoted this initiative. Unfortunately, the pandemic forced us to make radical changes to our original objectives", explains Aurora Losacco from the Interreg program, who has followed the Almonite ITC project from the beginning. Part of the seven hundred thousand euros allocated for the creation of the two sea routes was spent on feasibility studies that remained in the region. The rest of the money was used for alternative projects: "In the port of Termoli, some facilities were built to receive passengers and energy saving measures were carried out," says Losacco. "In Puglia, on the contrary, we decided to improve connections between already existing infrastructures, in particular between the port and Bari and Gargano airport, with the activation of the Gargano easy to reach bus line from June to September."

Losacco's assessment of the success of the project is clear: "So far it has not been possible to improve the connections between Italy, Montenegro and Albania as originally planned, but the money has been used to improve the internal road network. Changing the initial target was necessary in order not to be left with unused funds and therefore get less money for the next programming period." And she concludes: "The pandemic was an unforeseen event that particularly hurt the transportation sector."

Today it is not possible to reach Montenegro from Puglia by sea, except in the summer months of July and August, when a weekly connection operates. However, doubts have arisen about the usefulness of this summer connection. "In high season our market is absolutely overcrowded, especially on the coast, to the point that it creates problems for vacationers and locals," says Aleksandar Jovanovic, a representative of the association of entrepreneurs in the restaurant and tourism sector in the coastal town of Budva. "Montenegro is applying sanctions imposed by Brussels against Russia, but the number of arrivals from that country has not decreased, on the contrary. For those flying from Moscow, it is enough to make a connection in Belgrade or Istanbul. And after the war started, several thousand people, including Russians and Ukrainians, took up permanent residence in hotels. Not a small number for a city of 20,000 inhabitants".

Jovanovic, 45, was born and raised in Budva. His home and his business are still in the stone lanes of the old fortress, overlooking the Adriatic Sea and already surrounded by hotels, ever taller as they climb the mountains to provide sea views from the luxury suites on the top floors. "The development of tourism here was not planned. And the lack of strategy is reflected in our tourism offer. Everything is jumbled and chaotic in the summer months," he says, drawing on his 25 years of experience in the sector.

Among the battles that Jovanovic and his association have managed to attract the attention of successive governments in recent years are the fight to limit the height of new buildings, to set the maximum volume of outdoor music at 65 decibels and to reduce taxes during a pandemic. New demands include opening up migration flows to compensate for staff absences, and developing a national strategy to evenly distribute arrivals to the coast year-round and redistribute them to the mountains in the summer. The need for the latter point according to the National Tourism Organization of Montenegro is agreed by Matea Matan, who is in charge of promotion and development in the government agency and who follows the Italian market particularly closely. She shares the doubts in favor of a summer connection between Bar and Bari only in the summer months: "Thus, we attract Italian tourists only on the coast, when our infrastructures are not able to accommodate them. In fact, Montenegro's most valuable gems are inland. National parks, breathtaking landscapes for lovers of outdoor activities and nature, and a skiing season that lasts until the end of April," says Matan. "In addition, we focus on sustainable tourism. In recent years, more than two hundred agritourism businesses have sprung up in the country's mountain villages. They are a defense against the devastation of the areas. But in order to introduce tourists to these places