A solitary black pine towers above Mamula Island, a 19th-century fortress at the entrance to the Bay of Kotor. It stands sentinel to history, but also to the island’s lavish new incarnation, the beautifully restored and reimagined Mamula Island Hotel.
“An Indian guru who came here last summer and blessed the tree said it holds a lot of spiritual chatter,” Mamula Island Hotel General Manager Henning Schaub says.
The tree, a Montenegro pinus nigra, has inspired design elements in the hotel, as well as its elegant speakeasy, Pinea.
If this tree could talk, I wonder what it might say. Whispers of maritime winds and shipwrecking seas? Stolen kisses and first swims? Or perhaps the island’s storied past, both heroic and truly terrible.
Two days earlier, a speedboat had whisked me across the bay to this thimble of stone at the mouth of the Adriatic Sea, one of three defensive fortifications built in the 1850s by Austro-Hungarian General Lazar Mamula.
On one side, Croatia extends a final finger into the sea. On the other, the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Bay of Kotor dances away, a string of sun-bleached villages presided over by the Dinaric Alps.
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