Discover Albania: Europe’s hidden gem on the brink of a tourist boom. Photo / Abenteuer Albanien; Unsplash
In these days of mass tourism with overcrowded attractions and long queues, it is hard to find an undiscovered destination in Europe, but writer Pauline Ray has found one: Albania.
You’d better get there quickly - Albania is on the verge of being “discovered”, mainly by fellow Europeans who are swooping on the country for its low prices and its historic cities, beautiful mountains, lakes and beaches.
People avoided Albania for years because of its troubled history: years of being closeted as a communist regime under dictator, Enver Hoxha. But since his death in 1985, the country has slowly welcomed tourists. In 2009, 1.9 million tourists travelled to Albania. This year they are expecting to get to pre-Covid levels of 6.4 million, and 10 million by 2025.
Certainly, in our nine-day trip in June, we saw hordes of German camper vans and Swedish tour groups. Europeans are also buying up new seaside apartments in resort towns like Sarande, which I naively expected to be a small seaside village but it turned out to be more like the Gold Coast. Italian government officials recently chided their fellow citizens for choosing Albania as this year’s favourite holiday spot, instead of domestic Italian staples such as Puglia, where deck chairs cost €35-€50 a day.
My interest in going to Albania was piqued in two ways. Firstly, I read Free, by Lea Ypi, a London School of Economics professor who described her upbringing in communist Albania. The second magnet was through a Newsroom story about June Taylor, a New Zealand woman who went to live in Albania in the 1960s with her Communist father, who had been a dentist from Greymouth, where I grew up. June became the English language announcer for some decades on the Voice of Albania, and had quite a cult following as she announced and covered the death of Enver Hoxha.
So what does Albania have to offer the long-haul traveller? Well, to start with, it has cool cities, friendly people, and low prices, especially compared with its high-profile neighbours, Italy and Greece. It also has stunning scenery, as Albania is 70 per cent mountainous and it has a number of Unesco-stamped cities and historic architectural sites that bear witness to its years of invasion by Romans, Greeks and Ottomans.
Tirana, being the capital city of a country with an anti-capitalist regime for decades, didn’t get restaurants and bars until well into the 1990s. After a construction boom in the 2000s, the city now has a population of 560,000 and is now the epitome of a modern European city with wonderful bars and restaurants. The centre is largely pedestrianised and is a delight to walk around. We were there in balmy early summer weather and the locals were frequenting pavement bars and enjoying al fresco meals. We went to Shendevere Wine Bar in the former Tirana Castle precinct, a very cool precinct of restaurants and bars and had a fantastic meal of honeyed carrots and octopus. The streets were leafy and young people wore fashionably cool clothes. They were interchangeable with the youth of any European city, or indeed of New Zealand.
The modern architecture was brave and innovative, and we visited the Pyramid, a huge structure that Hoxha had started as a memorial to himself. It is now being completed and is going to be used as an events and arts centre. Tourists and locals can climb the 270 steps to get a stunning view of the city.
But around the city, there are reminders of Albania’s grim history. We set off naively to BunkArt1, thinking it was an underground art gallery. But no, it was a history of the secret police, during the 20th century, with corridors of displays including a contamination room, lots of cells and a very moving video about a woman who had been sent to a “re-education camp”. It is a brave reminder of the country’s troubled past, but we could only stomach a couple of corridors before escaping to the fresh air and sunshine. However, you can’t escape Albania’s troubled past for long as there are more than 170, 000 nuclear bunkers throughout the country.
There are plenty of reminders of history as you travel around. We visited Berove, a hamlet where the whole village had been wiped out by Germans in World War II. In Barmash Gorge we saw a huge monument, where there had been a battle between 300 partisan fighters and an elite German regiment. The partisans ambushed the regiment but the next day more Germans returned and wiped out the whole village, even the pets.
We visited Gjirokaster and Berat, two smaller cities of renowned beauty. Berat is a picturesque town known as the town of the 1000 windows, owing to the hillside houses which have tall vertical windows.
Gjirokaster was made famous by Chronicle of Stone, the 1971 novel by Ismail Kadare, the best-known Albanian writer. It is known as the City of Stone because of its slate roof houses, whose interior wooden beams have to be replaced every five years because of the weight of the roofs. While there we visited Zekate House, one of the grandest surviving examples of Ottoman architecture in Albania. Both cities have castles, which are worth the steep climb on foot. Safety concerns are not paramount but one castle had a sign on its alarmingly steep walls “please exit the castle by the gate.”
As a mountainous country, Albania is also brimming with tranquil lakes, rivers and streams. There are plenty of established hiking trails, but current visitors mostly come for the beaches. Among the most well-known are Ksamil and Gjipe: sandy and isolated. They feature clear turquoise water but don’t expect surf. Nevertheless, we had the best swims we have had, outside New Zealand.
The country is extremely productive, and our diet featured delicious fish such as seabass, tomatoes and huge strawberries, which were being sold roadside. Local farmers grow cherries, figs, strawberries and grapes. In one small village, we were treated to rose-petal jam, a delicious exotic treat. The wildflowers were beautiful and rampant throughout the countryside , including the national flower, ginestra, which we call broom. They also grow a lot of sage, which is exported to the US and France to be used in the production of medicine.
Another attraction is Albania’s reasonable prices for food and accommodation. We rarely spent more than $60 for three people for a main meal. Accommodation is also cheaper than rivals such as Croatia, Greece and Italy. We stayed in three-star accommodation, which was always comfortable.
History buffs have a plethora of sites to choose from, as Albania was invaded by so many other cultures, including Ottoman, Romans, Greeks and more latterly by the Italians and Germans. The two sites we visited were Appollonia and Butrint, which is the most visited cultural site in the country.
Appollonia was founded in 588 by Greeks from Corinth and quickly grew to 50,000 residents by the 2nd Century BC. Austrian archaeologists started excavating the site during World War 1 and the French later continued the work during the 1920s and 1930s. While Albanian archaeologists have made progress over the past few decades, much of this ancient city remains buried in a nearby hill.
The site of Butrint has been occupied since at least the 8th century BC but by the early 19th century it had dwindled to a small fishing village clustered around a Venetian castle. It is a huge site and what it offers is a remarkable journey through the ages of history. Its heritage retains a unique testimony of Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian and Ottoman cultures and civilisations.
The most popular cars seem to be Mercedes and Volkwagen, but in the countryside you will still come across donkeys and carts. Beware of the local drivers - they are erratic to say the least and are prone to passing on dangerous corners. Our Albanian driver just sighed and kept a respectful distance from other vehicles.
GETTING THERE
Pauline Ray flew Emirates to Dubai, and then directly on to Tirana with FlyDubai (Emirates’ short-haul airline). A private tour with a driver/guide, was booked through UK-based UnDiscovered Destinations. undiscovered-destinations.com
DETAILS
albania.al
Israel briefly closed its airspace following US attacks on Iranian nuclear sites.