Montelibero

What Montelibero is

Montelibero is an intentional community on the Adriatic coast of Montenegro, built around a shared commitment to libertarian values. It describes itself as an open social experiment: a test of whether a society organised on non-aggression, voluntary contracts and self-organisation can outcompete the alternatives.

The first settler arrived in the summer of 2020 and the project took shape the following year. It was started by Ukrainian agorists, the community around panarchy.ru and past and present members of the Libertarian Party of Russia, which is why Russian speakers from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan still make up most of it; participants from the United Kingdom, Lithuania, Israel, Montenegro, France and India have joined since.

Where Montelibero is

The community’s centrepiece is MTL City, a settlement on a hillside above the sea at Pečurice in the municipality of Bar, on Montenegro’s southern coast, alongside members already dispersed along the Montenegrin coast. Bar is the country’s main port, with the airports of Podgorica and Tivat within reach.

How Montelibero works

The project takes inspiration from the Free State Project in the United States, but with a deliberately different method. Because most of its members are foreign nationals, for whom direct involvement in local politics would be unwelcome, Montelibero seeks influence not through a voting bloc but by example: by being good neighbours and demonstrating its values in practice, in the hope of spreading them to the surrounding society.

Its affairs run through two decentralised organisations, the Montelibero Association and the Montelibero Fund, and an internal economy with its own euro-pegged stablecoin, EURMTL, issued on the Stellar network and accepted by a growing number of local businesses. The token is used for everyday transactions and to channel investment into the community’s ventures, including the building of MTL City.