Kotor Cable Car: Tickets, Hours & the Ride to Lovcen

An adult return ticket is €25, a one way is €14, and children aged 2 to 12 pay €7 return. The gondola runs 09:00 to 22:00, except on Tuesdays when it starts at 10:30, and the ride from the Dub station outside Kotor up to Kuk on Lovcen takes 11 minutes and gains 1,316 metres. Those prices come from the operator’s own shop and official tickets page, checked 2 August 2026 - this is a seasonal operation, so treat any figure, including ours, as good for the current season and confirm before you go if you’re travelling outside summer.

Now the part nobody puts on a booking page: the top station isn’t at the Njegos Mausoleum, and the walk between them isn’t a walk. That single misunderstanding is what turns a brilliant 11 minutes into a disappointing afternoon, and it’s worth understanding before you buy.

What a ticket costs right now

Children under 2 travel free. The full list is published on the operator’s ticket shop and on the tickets page of the official site, both checked on 2 August 2026.

Buying online rather than at the window does two things: it keeps you out of the queue at the Dub ticket hall, which in August is the slowest part of the whole outing, and it opens up the card promotions the operator runs. Through August 2026 the shop lists 15% off the Falcon Fly zipline and the Aerobar with Mastercard or CKB Visa payment, and 20% off the Alpine Coaster fast track for Mastercard Gold and Platinum holders. Those tickets can be bought any day but are only valid on Saturdays and Sundays, which is easy to miss in the small print.

One honest note on value. €50 for two adults to ride up and back isn’t cheap by Montenegrin standards, and it buys you a view rather than access to a sight. Whether that’s worth it depends entirely on the weather, which brings us to the next thing.

When it runs, and the Tuesday trap

The gondola operates 09:00 to 22:00 through the current summer season, with the last cabin up at 21:30 and the last one down at 22:00. On Tuesdays it opens at 10:30 rather than 09:00, and so does everything else in the complex, because that’s when the maintenance window sits. Turn up at nine on a Tuesday with a cruise ship schedule to keep and you’ve burned ninety minutes. Outside summer the line runs a shorter, seasonal calendar and has previously closed for weeks around the season start - check the operator’s site before an off-season visit rather than assuming these hours hold year-round.

The attractions at the top keep their own shorter hours, 10:00 to 21:00, so an early ride gets you the view before the coaster and the zipline open.

Weather is the real timetable here. The operator’s own booking page carries a line asking you to check the operating status before you set off, because wind and storms suspend the ride. The useful trick: the front page of the official site carries a live status badge reading “cable car is open” along with a live cabin count, so you can check from your hotel in ten seconds rather than driving out to Dub and finding out there. Do that the morning you go, not the night before, since summer wind on the Boka builds during the day.

Fog is the other one. A cabin climbing into cloud is a grey box with a window, and the operator will happily sell you the ticket because the machinery is running fine. If the top of Lovcen has a cap of cloud on it when you look up from Kotor, spend the money on a boat trip instead and come back tomorrow.

What the ride is actually like

The line is a Leitner GD10 gondola built as part of a concession the Montenegrin government signed in December 2021 with a consortium of Novi Volvox and Leitner. The first stone went in during July 2022 and the cable car opened for commercial service on 14 August 2023, which is a genuinely fast build for 3.9 km of ropeway up a limestone wall.

The numbers, from the national tourism board: 3,900 m of line, a vertical rise of 1,316 m, a top speed of 6 m/s, 48 cabins carrying up to 10 people each, and a design capacity of 1,200 passengers an hour. The cabins are all-glass Diamond EVO units, which matters more than it sounds, because the whole point is the floor-to-ceiling view sideways down the bay.

What it feels like: the first minute is unremarkable, low over scrub and the Tivat road. Then the ground drops away and stays dropped for eight minutes. You get the airport runway, the Verige narrows, the ferry crossing, Perast’s two islands as white dots, and eventually the entire Boka laid out like a relief map, which is a view you otherwise only get from a plane. Sit facing the sea, not the mountain, and if the cabin is busy let one go and take the next: they arrive continuously and you’ll wait about thirty seconds.

The mistake to avoid: the top station is not the mausoleum

The upper station is at Kuk, 1,348 m, on the Kotor side of the Lovcen massif. The Njegos Mausoleum, the thing most people picture when they think of Lovcen, sits on Jezerski vrh at 1,657 m, and by road it’s 6.1 km and about eight minutes of driving from the top station, according to routing on OpenStreetMap data checked on 2 August 2026. On foot that’s a two hour round trip along a mountain road with no pavement, before the 461 steps at the far end.

So a cable car ticket doesn’t get you to the tomb. If the mausoleum is your goal you need one of three things: a car waiting at Kuk, a seat on an organised tour that covers both, or a plan to drive the whole way up instead of riding. Our Lovcen National Park guide covers the mausoleum, its entry fees and the 461 steps in full.

What the ticket does get you is the view, and the view is the actual attraction. Treat the ride as the destination rather than as transport and the €25 makes sense. Treat it as a lift to a sight and you’ll feel short changed at the top.

Getting to the lower station at Dub

The Dub station isn’t in Kotor. It sits above the coast road southwest of town, about 200 m off the Budva to Tivat road, which puts it 4.2 km and roughly seven minutes from the Old Town by car. From Tivat airport it’s absurdly close, 3.3 km and about four minutes, so it works as a first or last morning of a trip. From Budva expect 17 km and 20 to 25 minutes.

Parking at Dub is paid: €1.30 an hour for a car, and €15 for three hours for a coach with €5 for each extra hour. There are several hundred car spaces, so finding one is rarely the problem, but a leisurely four hour visit adds €5 or so to the bill. At the top, parking at Kuk is free with about 60 spaces, which is worth knowing if you drive up the mountain and ride down for the view instead.

Without a car there are two routes. The operator runs an official shuttle service with lines from Kotor, Budva and Tivat plus private van and shuttle taxi options, sold and timetabled through its named partner GoShuttle (goshuttle.me) - book online there rather than turning up and asking, and check the combined bus-and-cable-car bundle tickets while you’re at it. Separately, a private operator runs a cruise passenger shuttle from the port of Kotor at €10 a head, paid on the bus, from 1 May to 30 November, with pickups timed at 08:45, 09:45 and 11:10 and a stated round trip of two to two and a half hours including the ride. That one isn’t the cable car company, so treat it as a taxi service with a schedule rather than an official product.

If you arrive by ship, the timings and the rest of a Kotor port day are set out in our Kotor cruise port guide.

What else is up there

The top station has grown into a small resort, and the extras are priced separately from the gondola:

• Alpine Coaster - a 1,056 m bob track, 3 to 5 minutes, €12, or €20 for the fast track queue. Ticket sales for it can be suspended between 18:00 and 21:00, per the operator’s own note.
• Falcon Fly - a short zipline, 1 to 2 minutes at up to 30 km/h, €15. Nobody under 4, riders aged 4 to 8 only with an adult, 135 kg limit for one rider.
• Aerobar 1400 - a bar platform hoisted 35 m above the ground for about ten minutes with a drink included, €20 for adults and €10 for children 4 to 12. Fifteen seats, so it’s not a spontaneous decision on a busy afternoon.
• An amphitheatre running Sunday sunset concerts through the summer, plus restaurants, a bazaar and a children’s playground.

Beyond the fence, the mountain itself is the reason to linger. Ivanova Korita, the beech-shaded hollow at around 1,250 m that serves as the park’s recreation hub, is a short drive from Kuk and has marked trails, shade and mountain lodges. In late July it can be fifteen degrees cooler than the Kotor waterfront, which for anyone who has tried to sleep in a stone Old Town flat in August is worth more than any zipline.

Cable car or the serpentine

The serpentine from Kotor is 30.8 km and around 40 minutes to the mausoleum, on a narrow road of stacked hairpins that some drivers love and others regret at bend nine. The cable car removes that road completely, and for anyone travelling with a passenger who dislikes drops, that alone is the argument. What it doesn’t remove is the need for wheels at the top if you want the mausoleum too. Our guide to renting a car in Montenegro covers the hire practicalities, and Cetinje, 18 km down the far side from Kuk, is the natural second half of the day.

One more thing on the horizon. Since February 2024 there has been a public plan to extend the line from Kuk over Ivanovo Korito and down to Cetinje, which would make a 10,780 m link between the coast and the old royal capital. It’s a plan, not a construction site, so don’t build a 2026 itinerary around it.

Nearby and read also

• Lovcen National Park - the mausoleum, the park fees and the mountain the cable car climbs.
• Kotor travel guide - the town at the bottom of the ride.
• Kotor city walls - the other climb above Kotor, on foot and for €15.
• Kotor cruise port guide - fitting the ride into a ship day.
• Cetinje - the old royal capital 18 km beyond the top station.
• Tivat Airport to Kotor - the transfer that passes almost the door of the Dub station.