Our Lady of the Rocks

The story starts in 1452, when two fishermen from Perast found an icon of the Virgin on a rock barely breaking the surface. One of them recovered from a long illness afterwards, and the rock became a place people returned to.

What followed took more than two hundred years. Sailors returning safely would throw a stone onto the reef; old and captured ships were loaded with rock and deliberately sunk alongside. Slowly, an island rose out of the bay. The church on top was built in 1632.

Inside there are sixty-eight baroque paintings and around 2,500 silver votive tablets left by sailors who came home - and one embroidered tapestry that took a woman twenty-five years to make, partly with her own hair, while she waited for a sailor who did not return.

The tradition has not stopped. Every year at sunset on 22 July, boats from Perast carry stones out to the island and throw them into the water - the fašinada, still widening the island after five and a half centuries.

The island is reached only by boat. From the water you see it the way it was meant to be seen: a church on a stone disc, with the bay behind it.