Lovćen

Lovćen is the mountain the country is named after. Seen from a ship entering the Bay of Kotor, its mass — dark with pine where it is not bare grey karst — was the monte negro of the Venetian sailors, the Crna Gora the land took as its own name. It is not high by Dinaric standards, Štirovnik topping out at 1,749 metres, but it is abrupt: the summit stands barely five kilometres from tidewater, and the wall it throws up behind Kotor is what made Old Montenegro defensible. For the four centuries the Ottomans held the lowlands, the theocratic statelet of the Petrović bishops survived in the limestone hollows behind this rampart, with Cetinje — now at the park's eastern foot — as its capital. The park, one of the 1952 trio, is small at 6,220 hectares, but it protects the historical core of the country in the most literal sense available.

The second summit, Jezerski vrh, carries the reason most people come. Petar II Petrović-Njegoš — prince-bishop, and author of The Mountain Wreath, the poem at the centre of the South Slav canon — asked to be buried here, above his capital, and was in 1855. The small chapel he built was replaced, after long controversy, by Ivan Meštrović's granite mausoleum, completed in 1974: 461 steps through a tunnel in the rock, two colossal caryatids in national dress, and a 28-ton Njegoš under an eagle's wing carved from a single block. Behind the tomb a circular viewing platform hangs over most of the country — the Bay of Kotor one way, Skadar lake the other, the Albanian and Bosnian ranges on the horizons, and on the clearest winter days a rumour of Italy.

The mountain in between is a lesson in karst. Rain that falls here reaches the sea underground; the surface gets dolines, sinkholes, and the funnel-shaped vrtače whose bottoms hold the only cultivable soil, each one walled and planted for potatoes in the old economy. The flora runs to some 1,300 species on the boundary where Mediterranean and continental climates grind past each other, and the villages — Njeguši above all, the Petrović cradle on its high polje — turned altitude into produce: the air-dried njeguški pršut smoked with beech at exactly this elevation is the standard against which Montenegrin prosciutto is measured.

What's worth knowing before you go

Cetinje is the natural base and deserves its own half-day of museums and embassies-turned-galleries; the park road climbs from there past the Ivanova korita visitor centre, where the springs, adventure park and lodges cluster at 1,250 metres. The mausoleum has an entrance fee and a season — the summit road can close with snow well into spring. Drivers coming from Kotor should take the old Austrian serpentine road with its twenty-five numbered hairpins, one of Europe's great engineered climbs, but treat it as one-lane with passing places, because it is.

Go early or late in the day in summer: the platform is small and the light across the karst is the whole point. The connoisseur's detail is at Njeguši, on the road down to Kotor — the village keeps smokehouse taverns where the pršut and cheese come from the lofts overhead, and eating there closes the circle the mausoleum opens, since Njegoš was born two doors up the lane.