Explore Albania

Tirana

The capital spent the 2000s being painted — a mayor with an art degree ordered the grey communist blocks daubed in oranges, purples and geometric blues, and the habit stuck. Skanderbeg Square anchors it, the Blloku district where Party officials once lived is now the nightlife quarter, and the Bunk'Art museums turn Hoxha's nuclear shelters into cold-war exhibits.

Sarandë

Albania's Riviera capital looks across six kilometres of water to Corfu, close enough that the ferry takes half an hour. The seafront promenade fills every summer evening, and the town works best as a base — Butrint is 20 minutes south, the Blue Eye spring 30 minutes inland.

Berat

Called the city of a thousand windows for the Ottoman houses stacked up the hillside, their glass fronts catching the light in tiers. The Mangalem and Gorica quarters face each other across the Osum, joined by a stone bridge, while the inhabited castle above still has families living inside its walls.

Gjirokastër

A steep grey town of slate roofs and stone lanes, birthplace of both Enver Hoxha and the novelist Ismail Kadare, who described it as the strangest city ever built. The Ottoman-era castle holds a captured American spy plane and commanding views down the Drino valley.

Ksamil

Four small islands sit just offshore in water so clear the boundary between sand and sea is hard to place — you can wade or paddle out to most of them. It has become the Riviera's most crowded stretch in August, which makes June and September the honest recommendation.

Shkodër

The cultural capital of the north and Albania's most bicycle-friendly city, spread beside the Balkans' largest lake. Rozafa Castle looks over the meeting of three rivers, and the town is the jumping-off point for the Koman ferry into the Accursed Mountains.

Krujë

Skanderbeg held this hillside fortress against three Ottoman sieges in the 15th century, which made him the national hero and Krujë the national pilgrimage. The old bazaar below the castle is the country's best-known market for carved wood, silver filigree and antique rifles of uncertain provenance.

Vlorë

Where Albania declared independence in 1912, and where the Adriatic gives way to the Ionian — the water noticeably clearer south of the city. It is the gateway to the Karaburun-Sazan marine park, the country's only protected stretch of sea, reachable by boat for snorkelling and cave diving.

Dhërmi

A whitewashed village clinging to the slope beneath the Llogara pass, with a long pebble beach below and stone lanes above. It has become the Riviera's summer-festival hub without entirely losing the old village at the top of the hill.

Himarë

A Greek-speaking coastal town with a ruined castle quarter above and a string of coves below — Livadhi, Potami, Gjipe reached only by boat or a walk down a canyon. Quieter than Ksamil and better for anyone who wants a beach without a beach club.

Durrës

Albania's main port and its oldest continuously inhabited city, founded as Epidamnos in the 7th century BC. The Roman amphitheatre sits half-excavated in the middle of the modern town, big enough once for 20,000 spectators, with a Byzantine chapel built into its lower tiers.

Theth

A valley of stone houses deep in the Accursed Mountains, reachable by road only recently and still feeling like the end of it. The lock-in tower where men sheltered from blood feuds under the medieval Kanun code still stands, and the day-hike over the pass to Valbona is the country's classic walk.

Valbona

A wide glacial valley on the far side of the pass from Theth, ringed by limestone peaks that stay snow-streaked into June. Most arrive the long way — the Koman ferry through a flooded gorge, then a road up the valley — which is half the point.

Korçë

The most French-influenced of Albanian cities, with a lycée tradition, a serious beer festival and the country's oldest brewery. The Old Bazaar has been handsomely restored, and the National Museum of Medieval Art holds an extraordinary collection of Orthodox icons.

Pogradec

Albania's window onto Lake Ohrid, the shared UNESCO water that is among the oldest and deepest lakes on earth. The lakeside promenade is made for slow evenings, and the koran trout — found nowhere else — is the thing to order.

Butrint

Less a town than a wooded peninsula stacked with 2,500 years of ruins: a Greek theatre, Roman baths, a Byzantine baptistery with a mosaic floor, and a Venetian tower, all inside a national park. Wander it early, before the Corfu day trips land.

Lezhë

Skanderbeg summoned the Albanian princes here in 1444 to form the league that resisted the Ottomans, and he is buried in the ruined cathedral. The nearby Kune-Vain lagoon is one of the better birdwatching spots on the Adriatic flyway.

Përmet

A small town on the Vjosa, one of the last wild rivers in Europe and now a national park along its whole length. It is the base for the Bënjë thermal springs and the Lengarica canyon, and it takes its cooking seriously enough to be Albania's unofficial gastronomic capital.

Elbasan

An Ottoman garrison town on the old Via Egnatia, the Roman road that ran from the Adriatic to Constantinople. The walled centre is compact and largely unvisited, which is much of its appeal.

Apollonia

A Greek colony that Cicero called great and dignified, where the young Octavian was studying when news arrived that Caesar had been murdered. The ruins sit on a quiet hill near Fier, sharing the site with a 13th-century Orthodox monastery.

A single wooded peninsula holding Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian and Ottoman remains layered on top of one another — a theatre, baths, a baptistery with one of the finest late-antique mosaic floors in the Mediterranean. Inscribed in 1992 and extended twice since, it sits inside a national park of lagoon and marsh.

Two Ottoman towns inscribed together in 2005 as rare surviving examples of the type. Berat stacks its thousand windows up the Osum valley with families still living inside the castle walls; Gjirokastër is greyer and steeper, its slate-roofed tower houses built like small fortresses.

Shared with North Macedonia, and one of the very few sites inscribed for both natural and cultural value. Lake Ohrid is among the oldest and deepest in the world, home to species found nowhere else; Albania's share was added in 2019 and takes in the Lin peninsula with its 6th-century mosaics.

A transnational site spanning eighteen countries, recording how beech recolonised Europe after the last ice age. Albania's contribution came in 2017: the Rrajca forest on the slopes of Shebenik and the Lumi i Gashit reserve in the northern mountains, both barely touched by logging.