Travelling in Serbia: where Belgrade ends and the banjas begin

Where the foreign visitor lands and stays

Foreign arrivals concentrate in one city to a degree that organises the whole tourist economy. Belgrade took almost two thirds of all foreign tourist arrivals in 2024, and the pattern is long established: 938,448 foreign tourists stayed in the city in 2018, more than half of all international visits recorded in Serbia that year. Novi Sad and Niš follow, and the list of foreign destinations effectively ends there.

Arrival explains part of it. The country's three international airports handled 9.3 million passengers in 2025, the great majority through Belgrade Nikola Tesla, which connects to 118 destinations in more than 40 countries, eight of them intercontinental. Air Serbia, based there, flew to 90 destinations in 34 countries and carried 4.5 million passengers in 2025, with long-haul services to New York City, Chicago, Toronto, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Niš Constantine the Great Airport works mainly with low-cost carriers, and Morava Airport is served by the flag carrier alone.

What holds visitors in Belgrade afterwards is eating and drinking. The city counts more than two thousand restaurants, coffee shops, bars and nightlife venues, and Skadarlija, a street of kafanas in the old bohemian quarter, supplied about a third of Belgrade's foreign currency income from tourism by the 2020s. Kafanas are old here: the first opened in 1522 and served Turkish coffee, and the count stayed high through the Ottoman and Habsburg wars of the 17th and 18th centuries. Conference and business travel adds to the same concentration, since the venues built to international congress standards are in the capital.

Two different series of visitor figures circulate, and reading them as one line produces nonsense.

The 2019 and 2022 rows count on a narrower basis than the accommodation figures for 2018 and 2024. Sector shares move about as much: hotels and catering were put at about 2.2% of GDP in 2015, tourism at 1.4% of GDP in 2017 with some 75,000 employed, and tourism at 3% of GDP for 2024. Chinese visitors were the most numerous foreign arrivals in 2019, ahead of arrivals from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Turkey and Germany.

Why the spa towns came first

The Serbian word for a spa is banja, and it sits inside so many place names that the history of tourism here is sometimes told as the history of the spas. The thermal and mineral springs were in organised use under Roman rule from the 1st century AD, when bathhouses were built on springs in what are now the Belgrade districts of Ada Huja and Karaburma. Medieval records describe Ovčar Banja with high domes over a large pool and smaller pools for cooling water that ran too hot, open to gentry and commoners alike. The Ottomans added hamams. The one at Sokobanja survives, and those at Brestovačka Banja and Novopazarska Banja are still in use.

The scale was already large before anything resembling modern tourism existed. The Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi visited Ovčar Banja in 1664 and reported 40,000 to 50,000 people arriving over the summer season, alongside the fairs and trading that came with them.

Nineteenth-century governments treated the water as infrastructure, hiring foreign geologists to survey the springs and posting doctors to the new centres. Banja Koviljača, Niška Banja and Vranjska Banja were the most visited before the First World War. Vrnjačka Banja, Sokobanja and Ribarska Banja are counted among the oldest, and Mataruška Banja was founded late in the same century. In 1922 the spas of the Morava Banovina alone recorded more than 2 million overnight stays, on territory covering a minority of present-day Serbia, and in 1937 Vrnjačka Banja took five times as many visitors as Dubrovnik on the Adriatic coast.

After 1945 the new authorities stripped the spas of their prewar exclusivity and rebuilt them around health treatment and family holidays, with workers' and trade union retreats attached. International sanctions in the 1990s and the transition that followed closed several: Jošanička Banja shut, Niška Banja went effectively out of use, while Vrnjačka Banja and Sokobanja grew. By 2020 there were 35 officially proclaimed and operational spas, drawn from a geothermal resource that supports about 60 balneological sites in total.

What the mountains are used for

Mountain resorts are the other half of the domestic market, and Kopaonik, Zlatibor and Stara Planina carry most of it. They sell skiing and winter sports in the cold half of the year and hiking through the warm half. The granite ridge of Kopaonik reaches 2,017 metres in a tectonically active zone that produces earthquakes. Midžor, in the Balkan Mountains along the Bulgarian frontier, reaches 2,169 metres. Jelovarnik, the waterfall on Kopaonik, falls 71 metres.

Protection is written across the whole of this terrain. Serbia records 462 protected areas covering 8,580 square kilometres, or 9.7% of the territory, and they are graded into five national parks, 22 nature parks, 32 landscapes of outstanding features, 62 nature reserves, seven protected habitats and 307 natural monuments. The national parks are Đerdap at 640 square kilometres, Fruška Gora at 250, Tara at 220, together with Kopaonik and Šar Mountain. Đavolja Varoš, a natural monument of 64 hectares, is the one geological curiosity that appears on the marketing lists beside them.

Water is the other mountain product. The Drina, which forms the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, is the main kayaking and rafting river on both sides of it. Winters on the Pešter plateau are severe because mountains ring it on every side, and the southwestern summits take up to 1,500 millimetres of precipitation a year against 540 to 820 in the lowlands.

How the Danube carries its visitors

The Danube runs 588 kilometres through Serbia or along its borders, 21% of the river's length, and river cruising has grown into a distinct product on it. Itineraries out of Budapest and Vienna stop at Belgrade and Novi Sad and at the riverside fortifications of Golubac and Ram.

The stretch that gives those cruises their subject is the Đerdap gorge in the east. Đerdap National Park follows a meander of the Danube from the 14th-century Golubac Fortress to the dam near Novi Sip, and together with parts of the Miroč and Kučaj massifs it forms the Đerdap UNESCO Global Geopark, designated in 2020 across 133,000 hectares holding 28,066 residents. The gorge runs more than 100 kilometres through the Southern Carpathians, between the Pannonian Plain to the west and the Dacian Plain to the east. Its geosites are mostly rock exposures and karst landforms: caves, karst springs, waterfalls and natural arches, of which the Prerast limestone bridge is the clearest. The viewpoints are Veliki Štrbac and Mali Štrbac in the Miroč mountains, and the visitor centre is at Donji Milanovac. Wolf and lynx live in the park, along with the Turkish hazel, a relic of the Tertiary.

Two archaeological sites sit in the same corridor. Lepenski Vir is a Danube settlement 8,000 years old, and Rudna Glava holds the earliest known evidence of copper mining and metallurgy in Europe, from the 5th millennium BCE.

Upstream in the northwest, the Bačko Podunavlje Biosphere Reserve was nominated in 2017 across 176,635 hectares of the central Danube plain, a mixture of alluvial forest, marsh, reed bed and flood-protected woodland still worked for agriculture and forestry. Serbia has 1,716 kilometres of navigable inland waterway in total, 963 of river and 673 of canal, all of it in the northern third of the country.

Which monasteries are worth the drive

Heritage travel here rests on Orthodox monasteries, Roman sites and medieval fortresses, and much of it sits away from the corridor that carries the main road and railway.

The serial World Heritage property Stari Ras and Sopoćani, in the Raška region of southern Serbia, gathers four components: Sopoćani Monastery, Đurđevi Stupovi, St Peter's Church and the archaeological site of the medieval town of Ras, which became the first capital of the Serbian state on the accession of the Nemanjić dynasty in 1159. The frescoes at Sopoćani were painted about 1270 to 1276. Đurđevi Stupovi was founded in 1170 and 1171 and keeps two layers of painting, from 1175 and from 1282 to 1283. St Peter's Church was raised in the 10th century on the foundations of a 6th-century baptistery.

Studenica, from the 12th century, is inscribed separately, as are Felix Romuliana, a Roman palace complex of the 3rd century at Gamzigrad, and a group of late medieval stećak necropolises at three sites in the southwest. A fifth inscription, the Medieval Monuments in Kosovo, covers Serbian Orthodox buildings in Kosovo; this catalogue records that the territory's status is disputed and takes no position on it.

Away from the inscribed sites, Mileševa holds the fresco known as the White Angel, painted in 1235 on the southern wall of the church. Churches of the Morava style, ornamented across the façade, followed in the late 14th and 15th centuries at Kalenić, Ravanica and Ljubostinja. Among fortifications, Smederevo, Manasija and Golubac are medieval, while the Belgrade and Petrovaradin fortresses are early modern and stand inside cities. Vojvodina offers something different again, in the late 19th- and early 20th-century centres of Subotica, Sombor and Zrenjanin, built in art nouveau and revival styles.

When the festivals fill the towns

Two events pull foreign visitors out of the capital for a week each. The Guča Trumpet Festival, held in the small town of Guča, has reached attendance of about 300,000 in peak years, which is a brass band audience many times the size of the place hosting it. Exit, staged on the Petrovaradin fortress at Novi Sad, has drawn more than 200,000 people in some editions, and in the 2018 season 25,000 to 30,000 of those came from abroad, from 60 countries.

Smaller festivals work the same way on a regional scale: Nišville jazz at Niš, Gitarijada at Zaječar, and Roštiljijada, the grill festival at Leskovac. Belgrade hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in 2008, after Serbia won the contest in 2007.

Several of the traditions a visitor meets at these events carry UNESCO inscriptions in their own right. The kolo circle dance was inscribed in 2017, singing to the gusle in 2018, and slava, the family patron saint's day, in 2014. Zlakusa pottery, unglazed vessels of clay and calcite turned on a hand wheel and used in restaurants across the country, followed in 2020, and the naive painting practices of Kovačica, a town with a Slovak community where the school began in the 1930s, in 2024. Šljivovica, the plum spirit distilled in handmade copper vessels and aged in oak for at least a year, was inscribed in 2022.

What the weather does across the year

The Republic Hydrometeorological Service of Serbia publishes climate normals for 1961 to 1990. Mean annual air temperature is 10.9 °C below 300 metres, around 10.0 °C between 300 and 500 metres, and around 6.0 °C above 1,000 metres. Absolute July maxima in the lower regions over that period ran from 37.1 °C to 42.3 °C, which is the range the northern plain reaches at the height of summer.

Rain follows altitude. Lowland totals run 540 to 820 millimetres a year, ground above 1,000 metres takes 700 to 1,000 millimetres, and some southwestern summits take up to 1,500. June is the wettest month at 12 to 13% of the annual total, and February and October the driest. Snow cover appears from late November to early March, with the greatest number of snow-covered days in January, which sets the length of the ski season. Sunshine totals 1,500 to 2,200 hours a year.

The wind has a name and a season. Košava, a cold and squally southeasterly, forms in the Carpathians, follows the Danube northwest through the Iron Gate where the gorge gives it a jet effect, and reaches Belgrade and sometimes as far south as Niš. It dominates autumn and winter across Vojvodina and Šumadija, while northwesterly and westerly winds prevail in the warmer half of the year, and southwesterlies hold in the mountains of the southwest.

How visitors move around the country

Almost everything sits on one line. The main communication and development axis runs southeast from Belgrade towards Niš and on to Skopje in North Macedonia, along the valley cut by the Great and South Morava, and the principal railway and motorway follow it together with most of the larger towns. To the east of that axis the ground rises into Stara Planina and the Serbian Carpathians, and the population thins out.

The spa and mountain resorts lie off the axis rather than on it, which is the practical reason the two travel markets stay separate. Kopaonik, Zlatibor and Tara are reached from the corridor by road heading southwest, and the eastern gorge country is reached by road along the Danube from Belgrade.

The currency is the Serbian dinar. Serbia joined the United Nations on 1 November 2000 and the Council of Europe on 3 April 2003, and it is not a member of the European Union, so a crossing from any neighbour is an international border and a change of money. Belgrade and Novi Sad are the two river stops on the Danube cruise route, and 1,716 kilometres of the country's waterways are navigable, all of them north of the capital's latitude.