Until the nineteenth century, Montenegro was almost unknown to the people in Western Europe, with whom it had no close diplomatic, cultural, or economic ties. However, since the nineteenth century, interest in this mystical, small Balkan country has been growing in Europe, which has resulted in the arrival of foreign envoys, diplomats, and scientists, coming on various missions. Even though they came to Montenegro with specific goals in mind, these foreigners left valuable travel notes about it. From these travelogues, as well as newspaper articles they published in their countries, the inhabitants of European cities were for the first time informed about Montenegro, its extraordinary nature, the highlanders who lived in these isolated areas, and the country’s turbulent history and customs. Travelogues of British, German, and French travel writers (although, of course, there were travelogues from other countries, for this paper we will solely dwell on Western European sources) tell us about the perception that foreigners had about Montenegro, about which they knew almost nothing. It is understood that foreigners came to this little-known country with certain prejudices, sometimes even fears, but the fact is that they were all fascinated by the natural beauty of Montenegro. The mountain landscape, as the entire region after all has been mystified through these vivid travelogues. They extend factual geographical knowledge and deal primarily with the imagination of mentality, customs, and general life in mountains. Since travel writers bring specific philosophy of place, their published accounts became a way of claiming and understanding the environment and therefore significantly influenced the way mountains are perceived, evaluated, and utilized. Therefore, the principal aim of this paper is to single out the experiences foreign travel writers had when encountering Montenegrin mountains and the highlanders who lived on them–how they understood the fact that a Montenegrin man was a man of the mountain and that mountains influenced the characterology and the very identity of Montenegrins. By crossing it with historiographic analysis, the aim is to explore the ways nineteenth and early twentieth-century explorers from abroad understood the cultural identity of mountainous Montenegrin communities.