The north, the middle and the south in a fortnight on minibuses and one boat — a passenger ferry through a flooded gorge into the northern Alps, a walking pass between two valleys with no road between them, then the Ottoman towns, the Greek and Roman coast, and the port where the pyramid schemes broke in 1997. The east, Korçë and Lake Ohrid, is the one region it leaves out.
Tirana
Start at the Pyramid, built in 1988 as a museum to Enver Hoxha, abandoned, argued over for thirty years and reopened in 2023 as a technology school with staircases up the outside. Then Skanderbeg Square and Blloku, the few streets that were closed to ordinary Albanians until 1991 because the leadership lived in them.
Tirana underground
Bunk'Art 1 is the leadership's nuclear shelter under the Dajti foothills — five storeys, 106 rooms, finished in the late 1970s and unknown to the public until it opened as a museum in 2014. In town, the House of Leaves occupies the Sigurimi building and explains the surveillance apparatus room by room. Both are cold in every sense; take a jacket.
Krujë, then north
Skanderbeg held this hill against three Ottoman sieges between 1450 and 1467, and the castle museum built in 1982 is as much about the 1970s as about the fifteenth century. Carry on to Shkodër in the afternoon; the road runs along the flat and the mountains stay on your right the whole way.
Shkodër
Rozafa castle sits where three rivers meet and holds Illyrian, Venetian and Ottoman walls in one circuit. In town, the Marubi museum keeps the negatives of a photographic studio that operated from 1856 through five changes of state — a family archive of several hundred thousand plates, and the best single record of what this country looked like before anyone here owned a camera.
The Koman ferry
A minibus at dawn to the dam at Koman, then the boat up the reservoir to Fierzë. The water fills a gorge that used to be the Drin, the walls come down to it vertically, and villages on the bank are served by this boat and nothing else. A second minibus meets it for the run up the Valbona valley.
The Valbona valley
A day to walk the valley floor and the side gullies before the pass. The riverbed is enormous and mostly dry in late summer, which tells you what it does in April. Guesthouses here are farmhouses with rooms added; half board is the norm and the raki is not optional so much as inevitable.
Over the pass to Theth
The crossing: about six to eight hours, a climb to roughly 1,800 metres at Qafa e Valbonës and a long descent through beech woods into the next valley. It is a walking route, not a scramble, but there is no shelter on top and weather comes in fast. Your guesthouse sends the luggage round by road.
Theth
The stone church, the Grunas waterfall and the lock-in tower — a kulla where a man under a blood feud could live out of rifle range, which is the plainest surviving explanation of the Kanun, the customary law that governed these mountains when the state did not reach them. The Blue Eye above the village is a two-hour walk each way.
Down to Durrës
The last unpaved stretch of the road out to Shkodër was asphalted in September 2021, and the drive that used to take four hours in a jeep now takes two to two and a half in an ordinary van. Coach south in the afternoon to the coast. Durrës has the largest Roman amphitheatre in the Balkans, found in 1966 when the archaeologist Vangjel Toçi noticed a fig tree in his own garden sinking into the ground; a Byzantine chapel with wall mosaics sits in one of its passages.
Apollonia and Berat
Apollonia was founded by Greek colonists around 600 BC and grew rich on the road inland; Octavian was studying here in 44 BC when the news came from Rome that Caesar had been killed, and he left immediately. The site is fields, columns and a Byzantine monastery, with almost nobody in it. Berat is ninety minutes further east.
Berat
The castle is not a monument; several hundred people live inside the walls, and the churches among the houses hold the icons of Onufri, who painted in the sixteenth century and mixed a red nobody has matched. Below, Mangalem and Gorica face each other across the Osum in tiers of windows. UNESCO added Berat to the Gjirokastër listing in 2008.
South along the Vjosa
From Fier the road turns inland and climbs the Vjosa through Memaliaj to Tepelenë, and the river beside it has been a national park since 15 March 2023 — the first in Europe declared over a wild river, covering its whole Albanian course and three tributaries, though the headwaters in Greece, where it is the Aoös, are outside it. Some thirty hydropower projects had been proposed on the river and its feeders; the two that had got as far as permits, at Kalivaç and Poçem, were the ones the campaign killed. At Tepelenë the Drino comes in from the south, and the road follows it up to Gjirokastër.
Gjirokastër and the tunnel
Stone houses with slate roofs stacked up a slope, the Ottoman bazaar, and tower houses — the Zekate and the Skënduli — where families still show you round their own building. Under the town runs the Cold War Tunnel, some 800 metres and 59 rooms dug in the early 1970s for three hundred of the district leadership, and open to visitors since 2014. Both Enver Hoxha and Ismail Kadare, who died in 2024, were born in this town.
Butrint, then the coast road to Vlorë
An early start for Butrint on its promontory — Greek theatre, Roman forum, a baptistery mosaic kept under sand for its own protection, a Venetian tower and an Ottoman fort, all inside a lagoon. Then north on the Riviera: Himarë, the Llogara pass at about 1,000 metres with the whole coast below it, and down into Vlorë.
Good to know
Albania is outside the EU and outside the Schengen area: EU, UK, US, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand passports enter visa-free for 90 days in any 180, and those days do not count against a Schengen allowance, which is the main reason people use the country to sit out a Schengen clock. The Koman ferry is the fixed point the northern half of this route is built around: there are two or three boats, they leave in the morning and not in the afternoon, and a car costs far more than a foot passenger and needs booking days ahead — going on foot and picking up minibuses at each end is cheaper and simpler. The Valbona–Theth pass is a summer route, walkable roughly from June to early October; outside that there is snow on top, most guesthouses in both valleys close, and the sensible plan is to skip the mountains entirely rather than to try. Guesthouses at both ends run luggage between Valbonë and Theth by road for a fixed fee, which takes most of a day to go round by Shkodër while you take six hours to walk over — hand it over the night before. Intercity transport is furgons, shared minibuses that leave when they are full rather than at a published time, so travel in the morning; departure points in Tirana are scattered around the ring road and change, and asking your accommodation the night before saves an hour. The one timetable that will strand you is the Riviera: buses from Sarandë to Vlorë over Llogara run from about 05:30 to the early afternoon, the last of them around 14:30, so Butrint has to be finished by lunchtime or the last day breaks in half. Cash in lek for anything in the mountains, and note that ATMs here almost all offer a conversion at their own rate at the last screen, which is always worse than your bank's — decline it. Albania was declared clear of landmines in 2009, so advice about the Kukës border area is out of date; the genuine risk on this trip is the traffic, on two-lane roads where overtaking habits are enthusiastic and the fatality rate is among the higher ones in Europe.
Shorter or longer?
From Gjirokastër turn inland for three or four more days — Përmet, the Ottoman bridge and thermal pools at Bënjë in the Lengarica gorge, then over to Korçë and Lake Ohrid, which is the part of Albania that looks nothing like the coast.
Tirana, Berat, Gjirokastër, Butrint and the Riviera, ending in Vlorë. Cuts the ferry, the pass and both mountain valleys, and removes every day that depends on the weather.