Et’s a truism: You can’t go on holiday by the sea in Hungary or Switzerland. If you want to go to the water there, you have to make do with Lake Balaton or various rivers or mountain lakes. Apparent truism: It’s similar in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Anyone who thinks of Bosnia when holidaying (which very few should do anyway, although there are beautiful hiking routes there) certainly does not think of the beach and the Mediterranean Sea. Viewed on a globe or a coarse-grained map of Europe, Bosnia does indeed appear to be a landlocked country with the Dalmatian coast barring any access to the sea. A closer look, however, reveals what everyone in Bosnia knows: The country does have access to the Mediterranean Sea, even if it is only a tiny, almost symbolic one: In the Bay of Neum, Bosnia juts shyly seven or at most eight kilometers to the Adriatic Sea . To be more precise, it should be: The part of the country Hercegovina protrudes towards the Adriatic Sea.
In any case, anyone who wants to go to the sea can holiday here without having to leave Bosnia-Hercegovina. Until 2010, when locals still needed a visa to travel to the EU, this was an option for some Bosnians, if only for convenience. But even today, beach holidays in Neum remain popular in Bosnia. You feel like you’re not in the country anymore, and yet you are. Or not. Because when you talk to people in Neum, many say you are in Croatia as a matter of course. Almost 5,000 souls live in the Hercegovinian coastal town, and almost 98 percent of them identified themselves as belonging to the Croatian ethnic group in the most recent census in 2013. The people here acknowledge that their place formally belongs to Bosnia, nothing more. In everyday life it feels like being in Croatia, and if you don’t have a Bosnian mark with you, you can also pay in Croatian kuna.
Like being on a lake
Of course, a stay in Neum doesn’t look like a real vacation by the sea because of the horizon. Because it is not determined by the distant line on which the sky is supported on the sea, but by a peninsula in front of the bay. It looks a bit like being on a lake. But that at least reduces the waves. There aren’t a dime a dozen hotels and guesthouses in the small town, but there are plenty of them.
The “Grand Hotel” is particularly large, hardly surprising given the name, which dates back to socialist times and, like the Hotel “Sunce” (Sun), has retained some of the charm of the recreational hotbeds of that time, despite several renovations.
There aren’t really any sights in Neum, but Dubrovnik is theoretically little more than an hour and ten minutes away. In practice, however, crossing the border can become quite lengthy since Croatia joined the EU in 2013. After all, the outer border of the EU runs near Neum, with passport controls, customs and all the fanfare. In order to avoid the annoying formalities, Croatia even had a Chinese company build a bridge for almost a billion euros (the EU paid for it above all), so that travelers can drive around the Hercegovinian wedge in Dalmatian territory and save themselves the border formalities .
