Smart Self-Managed Tours

City guide · Serbia

Belgrade

A photograph of Belgrade
Photograph · Radosław Botev · CC BY 3.0 pl

Belgrade is 389.12 km² holding 1,197,714 people, and it stands on the point where the Sava runs into the Danube. That confluence is why the city exists and why it has been fought over so relentlessly: it has been battled over in 115 wars and razed 44 times. The name Beograd means white city. The administrative area holds 1,682,720 people across 3,234.96 km² in 17 municipalities. The part a visitor uses is a fraction of that — the old town on the ridge above the rivers, and the streets running down from it.

Practical information
Language spoken
Serbian
Written in both Cyrillic and Latin; English is understood in tourist districts
Dialling code
+381 11
Belgrade landlines; drop the leading 0 of 011 when calling from abroad
Currency
Serbian dinar (RSD)
Euros are not accepted; cards are widely taken in Belgrade
Emergency number
112
One number across the country; 194 reaches an ambulance directly
Plug type
Type C and F · 230 V
Standard European two-pin
Tap water
Not recorded
No verified national source in the dataset

Planning a visit

Suggested stay
2–3 days
Getting around
Tram, bus and on foot
  1. January: seasonal closure recorded
  2. February: seasonal closure recorded
  3. March: seasonal closure recorded
  4. April: no seasonality data recorded
  5. May: recorded as a best month to visit
  6. June: recorded as a best month to visit
  7. July: no seasonality data recorded
  8. August: no seasonality data recorded — this month
  9. September: recorded as a best month to visit
  10. October: seasonal closure recorded
  11. November: seasonal closure recorded
  12. December: seasonal closure recorded

Top things to see

Ranked by importance — sitelinks, pageviews and heritage status, not editor preference.

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Category

Historic monuments 510 Museums 67 Places of worship 140 Nature sites 0 Viewpoints 0 Food and drink 0 Markets and shopping 0 Entertainment 0 Nightlife 0 Family attractions 0 Art and culture 0 Activities 0

Typical visit duration

Up to 1 hour 11 1 to 2 hours 55 Half a day or more 1

Interests

History 67 Art 0 Museums 67 Nature 0 Sea and beach 0 Viewpoints 0
  1. Nikola Tesla Museum
    01 1 hour

    Nikola Tesla Museum

    The Nikola Tesla Museum holds Tesla's papers and Tesla's ashes, in a villa on a residential street.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Vračar
  2. House of Flowers
    02 1 hr 30 min

    House of Flowers

    The House of Flowers is Tito's grave, and it was built as a greenhouse.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Savski Venac
  3. Museum of Yugoslav History
    03 2 hours

    Museum of Yugoslav History

    The Museum of Yugoslav History sits in Dedinje and exists because Josip Broz Tito is buried in its garden.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Savski Venac
  4. National Museum of Serbia
    04 2 hr 30 min

    National Museum of Serbia

    The National Museum is the oldest and largest museum in Serbia, and it was shut for fifteen years.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Stari Grad
  5. Museum of Contemporary Art
    05 2 hours

    Museum of Contemporary Art

    The Museum of Contemporary Art is Belgrade's dedicated institution for 20th- and 21st-century Yugoslav and Serbian art, standing on the tip of Ušće park in New Belgrade, at the point where the Sava river meets the Danube.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • New Belgrade
  6. Ethnographic Museum
    06 1 hr 30 min

    Ethnographic Museum

    The Ethnographic Museum documents the folk life of Serbia and the wider South Slavic region: costume, craft and custom rather than fine art.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Stari Grad
  7. Princess Ljubica's Residence
    07 1 hour

    Princess Ljubica's Residence

    Princess Ljubica's Residence is an 1830 town house in Belgrade's Stari Grad district, built for Prince Miloš Obrenović as a home for his wife, Princess Ljubica, and their sons Milan and Mihailo.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Stari Grad
  8. Museum of African Art
    08 1 hour

    Museum of African Art

    A single-donor museum in a quiet villa street, the Museum of African Art holds nothing acquired by an institution — the entire founding collection came from Zdravko Pečar and Veda Zagorac, a Yugoslav diplomat and his wife who spent years…

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Savski Venac
  9. Belgrade Military Museum
    09 1 hr 30 min

    Belgrade Military Museum

    The Military Museum traces back to 1878, when the Serbian army founded a collection of captured Ottoman weapons in Kragujevac; it moved to Belgrade and, since 1924, has occupied a purpose-built structure on the upper terrace of Kalemegdan, designed by…

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Stari Grad
  10. Royal Palace
    10 1 hr 30 min

    Royal Palace

    The Royal Palace was built between 1912 and 1929 in Dedinje for King Alexander I Karađorđević, its construction interrupted by the Balkan Wars and the First World War and finished only after Alexander proclaimed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Savski Venac
  11. Museum of Vuk and Dositej
    11 45 min

    Museum of Vuk and Dositej

    The Museum of Vuk and Dositej is a single-house museum in the Stari Grad district of Belgrade dedicated to two figures of the Serbian Enlightenment: Dositej Obradović (1742–1811), writer and Serbia's first Minister of Education, and Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787–1864)…

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Stari Grad
  12. Residence of Prince Miloš
    12 45 min

    Residence of Prince Miloš

    The Residence of Prince Miloš was built between 1830 and 1834 for Miloš Obrenović, the prince who led Serbia's second uprising against Ottoman rule and secured its autonomy, and it is one of the few surviving buildings from that transitional…

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Savski Venac
  13. Railway Museum
    13 1 hour

    Railway Museum

    The Railway Museum in Savski Venac is the national collection of Serbian and former Yugoslav railway history, founded on 1 February 1950. Its first exhibition, in 1953, was titled "Through the History of Yugoslav Railways".

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Savski Venac
  14. Museum of Applied Arts
    14 1 hr 30 min

    Museum of Applied Arts

    The Museum of Applied Art on Vuka Karadžića street holds over 37,000 objects spanning 2,400 years of applied art, founded on 6 November 1950. Its oldest pieces are Ancient Greek coins from the fourth century BC.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Stari Grad
  15. Hammam of Prince Miloš
    15 15 min

    Hammam of Prince Miloš

    The Hammam of Prince Miloš is a Turkish-style bathhouse built in 1836-37, and it is currently a bath nobody can bathe in: OpenStreetMap's own record of the site, last checked 27 April 2026, lists its opening hours as switched off.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Savski Venac
  17. Belgrade City Museum
    17 2 hours

    Belgrade City Museum

    The Belgrade City Museum (Muzej grada Beograda) was founded in 1903, when the city assembly voted to build a collection documenting Belgrade itself rather than the wider Serbian state.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Savski Venac
  19. Historical Museum of Serbia
    19 1 hour

    Historical Museum of Serbia

    The Historical Museum of Serbia (Istorijski muzej Srbije) was established in 1963 as the national institution charged with collecting material on Serbian history from the medieval state through the twentieth century, distinct from the archaeology-focused National Museum next to Republic…

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Stari Grad
  20. Jevrem Grujić's House
    20 10 min

    Jevrem Grujić's House

    The house known today as Jevrem Grujic's House is one of the oldest preserved civic houses in Belgrade's old town, built in the early decades of the nineteenth century, in the years after the Serbian uprisings when the town's Ottoman-era…

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Stari Grad
  21. Jewish Historical Museum
    21 1 hour

    Jewish Historical Museum

    The Jewish Historical Museum (Jevrejski istorijski muzej) opened in 1948, founded by the historian Lavoslav Kadelburg and colleagues under the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia, and it remains housed inside the federation's own building on Kralja Petra street in…

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Stari Grad
  22. Manak's House
    22 45 min

    Manak's House

    Manak House is a timber-framed merchant house in Savamala, Belgrade, that now holds an ethnographic collection inside the walls it was actually lived in.

    • Must see
    • Museum
    • Savski Venac

Source: OpenStreetMap contributors, Wikidata ·

Where to base yourself

District boundaries come from OSM administrative relations, so a district page holds exactly the places inside it — plus, for the islands and the coast, the nearest district by proximity.

  • Stari Grad

    Places
    571
    Across the district
    35 min

  • Savski Venac

    Places
    222
    Across the district
    1 hr 24 min

  • New Belgrade

    Places
    184
    Across the district
    2 hours

  • Vračar

    Places
    135
    Across the district
    40 min

  • Zemun

    Places
    127
    Across the district
    4 hr 56 min

  • Palilula

    Places
    131
    Across the district
    7 hr 42 min

  • Zvezdara

    Places
    116
    Across the district
    1 hr 48 min

  • Čukarica

    Places
    95
    Across the district
    3 hr 6 min

  • Voždovac

    Places
    87
    Across the district
    4 hr 29 min

  • Rakovica

    Places
    60
    Across the district
    1 hr 55 min

How the city is laid out

Two Belgrades, split by the Sava.

Old Belgrade sits on the ridge on the right bank, above the confluence. The fortress is at the point; Stari Grad, the old town, runs back from it; Vračar rises behind that with the Church of Saint Sava on top; Dorćol drops north towards the Danube and Savamala south towards the Sava.

New Belgrade is on the left bank of the Sava, built from 1948 onward on empty ground to demonstrate that Yugoslavia was at the forefront of progress. It is towers and boulevards on a grid and it is a different city.

Zemun, further up the Danube on the left bank, was a separate town under Austria-Hungary until the twentieth century and still reads as one — low houses, a hill with a tower, and the border of an empire running through it.

Checked 2026-08-23

Getting around

Trams, buses, trolleybuses and walking. There is no metro.

A metro has been discussed for decades and is not in operation; anyone reading about the Belgrade metro is reading about a construction programme, not a way to get across the city today.

The old town is compact and the walk from the fortress to the Church of Saint Sava takes about half an hour, all of it through the parts a visitor came for. New Belgrade and Zemun need transport.

Taxis are cheap by western European standards and are the usual way across the river at night.

Checked 2026-08-23

Common questions

How many days does Belgrade need?

Two to three. Two cover the fortress, Kalemegdan, the old town and the Church of Saint Sava. A third adds Zemun on the Danube and a look at New Belgrade.

Is there a metro?

No. Belgrade runs trams, buses and trolleybuses, and a metro has been discussed for decades without entering service. The old town is walkable and taxis are cheap.

What does Beograd mean?

White city. The name is literal.

Why is the city so scarred?

It stands where the Sava meets the Danube, which made it the frontier between empires. It has been fought over in 115 wars and razed 44 times.

What is the difference between Old and New Belgrade?

The Sava. Old Belgrade is the ridge above the confluence with the fortress at its point. New Belgrade is on the left bank, built from 1948 on empty ground as a demonstration of Yugoslav modernity.

Which districts should I stay in?

Stari Grad for the old town, Vračar behind it for a quieter residential base, Dorćol towards the Danube and Savamala on the Sava for the nightlife. Zemun is a separate town in feel and is further out.

Turn this list into a plan

Set your days, your pace and the hours you actually want to be out. The planner works around closing days and travel time, and leaves room to eat.

Plan Belgrade