Albania Turism Guide

Albania Turism Guide I am an Albania Tour Guide, who organizes 1-day,2-day or multiple day private tours in Albania.

I arrange your transportation and i am your english speaking guide. so that, you get to experience the mos beautiful places in albania .

Beaches, mountains, ancient towns and low prices? Albania has it allDespite its dark 20th-century past, the country is n...
19/03/2024

Beaches, mountains, ancient towns and low prices? Albania has it all
Despite its dark 20th-century past, the country is now a traveller’s paradise of amazing landscapes, coast and historic cities
t used to be rare that journalists would come here,” says Elton Caushi, head of tour operator Albanian Trip, who I meet in the capital, Tirana. “When they did come, they only wanted to talk about blood feuds and sworn virgins.”

The traditions that once dominated tribal politics in Albania’s mountains are interesting, but I’m here to probe a more recent view of the south-east European country. Thanks to its beaches, Unesco-stamped cities and hiking routes, formerly communist Albania is being lauded as a “hot new” European travel destination beyond backpacking and dark tourism.
For decades, Albania had a reputation as a dangerous, no-go country, thanks largely to its being politically isolated under dictator Enver Hoxha, who died in 1985. After Albania’s 1997 civil war and the end of the Kosovo war in 1999, more visitors gradually started coming to Albania, attracted partly by prices lower than in Greece and Italy. In 2009, 1.9 million tourists travelled to Albania; in 2019, the last full pre-Covid year, the figure was 6.4 million.

The food here may be a factor in this shift. I’m with Caushi in a nameless restaurant at 1001 Bardhok Biba, a street close to the city centre. “The tourists haven’t found it – it’s mainly drivers eating here,” he says. I breakfast on sumptuous tasqebap – a soupy mix of veal, garlic, onions and tomato sauce – before Caushi takes me for 9am dessert at Mon Amour, a Parisian-style patisserie. We pay a non-Parisian 390 lek (£2.80) for coffee and baklava pastries with ice-cream. After breakfast I drive to Dhërmi, a village that has seen myriad hotels pop up along its coast over the past decade. I arrive at the beginning of Kala, one of many small dance music festivals that have sprung up along the Riviera, with dancefloors on the sand.Dhërmi’s main, non-festival beach is clean, neatly covered in sunbeds and flanked by restaurants. All fine if you just want to lie back and plough through your Kindle. The small beaches north of here, such as Splendor Del Mar and Empire Beach Resort, feel gloriously Balearic in comparison. Swimming in the clear, turquoise sea off Splendor is clock-slowingly tranquil. I haven’t had a better dip outside Asia.

Later, on a walk to nearby Gjipe beach – sandy, lovely, isolated, with zero hotel development – I spot a concrete bunker and stare at this dome with a sea view: a grey lump of cold war paranoia on an otherwise idyllic coast.I see another bunker. Then another, in the hills when I drive back to Dhërmi. I begin counting them, but soon realise bunkers are as common here as the sunbathing skinks. About 173,371 were reportedly built in Albania between 1975 and 1983, as Hoxha prepared for potential attack.

Caushi warned me that the touristy cities of Durrës and Sarandë were already attracting enough holidaymakers to make them unpleasantly crowded. I stop instead in Gjirokastër and Berat: two smaller cities of renowned beauty.

I prepare by reading Chronicle in Stone, the 1971 novel by Ismail Kadare – Albania’s noted author and Gjirokastër resident. In the book the romance of Gjirokastër’s steep, bumpy paths, snaking around buildings such as Skenduli House and Zekate House – owned by elite families and now museums – shines through his story of 1940s bombardments.
‘When I was a child in the 2000s, to see a tourist was like seeing an alien’
Blero Topulli, guide

His ink covers the city – my hotel is on Ismael Kadare Street. However, Gjirokastër was once as famous for cannabis as Kadare, according to Blero Topulli, who works in the castle of Gjirokastër. “It was considered one of the most dangerous points in Europe – we had a village producing tonnes of cannabis,” he says. “When I was a child in the 2000s, to see a tourist was like seeing an alien.”

We meet in the castle overlooking the village of Lazarat, which was rife with illegal drug production until a police crackdown in the mid-2010s.hanks to its historical architecture, Gjirokastër became a Unesco site in 2005, but Topulli says tourists didn’t arrive in significant numbers until the cannabis gangsters had left. We walk the bazaar streets, renovated five years ago for this tourism tilt, but it’s easy to escape this mildly Disneyfied pocket of the city. Topulli takes me uphill to watch the sunset, passing mansions depicted by Edward Lear in the mid-19th century.

“Listen: the wind in the trees sounds like the sea,” says Topolli. He’s right: it laps my ears as the castle’s lights flick on, a calming comedown after Kala’s beach parties.

Further north in Berat, also a Unesco-listed city, I walk up to the castle. Berat has a similar historic richness to Gjirokastër – and similarly steep climbs – but feels more rugged.

The breezy lack of health and safety concerns in Berat makes it even more enjoyable. At the Red Mosque ruins, I scurry up the scarily thin tower’s pitch-black interior, popping my head over the top so vertigo can override my rising claustrophobia.“I came to Albania because you can do beach, cities and hiking in a week,” a US tourist tells me. Indeed, after a two-hour drive to Tirana it’s a two-hour bus ride to Shkodër, gateway to the Albanian Alps.

I do a classic trek: the 17km route between Valbona and Theth in the Valbona Valley national park. To get in the mood, I read Edith Durham’s High Albania, the British writer’s document of the region’s tribes, based on her 1908 treks. The toughness of the climb, with horse-dotted woods giving way to craggy half-paths, threatens to outmatch the wild beauty of the area. But three hours in I reach the peak, and the forest-splashed views work their magic: it’s Swiss-level stunning. In mountain-cradled Theth, my guesthouse pancake breakfast is soundtracked by the tense “click-click-click” of diggers. The snaking road to Shkodër was surfaced with asphalt for the first time last year.

Caushi says that some fear Theth’s new highway could lead to overtourism. “But I’m happy for my friends there: 15 years ago you’d see a cow, a chicken, a cornfield. Now they can get to school faster, to the hospital … it’s good for the locals.”Good for me too, I think, as my bus to Shkodër glides over asphalt.
I finish back in Tirana, staying at Hotel Boutique Kotoni in the city centre, then the quieter Morina hotel, next to the Grand Park of Tirana. Being the capital city of a country with an anti-capitalist regime until 1992, Tirana didn’t get proper bars until well into the 1990s, according to Caushi. After a construction boom in the 2000s, the city now has a population of 560,000. Hoxha’s opulent former residence has a trendy cafe directly in front of it.

I’m in Tirana fleetingly, but visit Bunkart 1, Hoxha’s underground complex, which is now a museum and art space. Exhibitions outline decades of dictatorship, interspersed with art installations. Wrongly balanced, the mix of dark history and video art could come across as distastefully hipster-ish, but it’s captivatingly moving.

Another reminder of how quickly a place can change.

Accommodation in Dhërmi was provided by Kala; Tirana accommodation provided by Hotel Boutique Kotoni (doubles from €100 B&B, hotelkotoni.com) in conjunction with Albanian Trip and Radisson Collection Morina hotel (doubles from €80 room-only

Gryka e KelcyresGryka e Këlcyrës (në kohët e moçme e njohur si Fauces Antigonenses),është një grykë me pamje spektakolar...
13/02/2023

Gryka e Kelcyres

Gryka e Këlcyrës (në kohët e moçme e njohur si Fauces Antigonenses),është një grykë me pamje spektakolare pranë qytetit të Këlcyrës.

Kjo grykë madhështore e cila shtrihet midis Këlcyrës dhe Dragotit me një gjatësi prej 13 km formon një kanion thellësia e të cilit arrin deri në 1.000 metra.

Në shpatin e djathtë të grykës gjenden shpellat e Mezhgoranit dhe Dragotit ndërsa përgjatë lumit mund të admirohen shumë burime nëntokësore, ndër të cilët veçojmë Ujin e Zi të Këlcyrës i cili del në sipërfaqe në buzë të shtratit të lumit Vjosa duke krijuar një shumëllojshmëri ngjyrash.

Bukuri e veçantë janë dhe burimet karstike të zonës së quajtur “Rrepet e Këlcyrës”, objekt që funksionon si pikë turistike, të cilët dalin në sipërfaqe në një lartësi rreth 50 m mbi shtratin e lumit Vjosa duke krijuar ujëvara të mrekullueshme.....
Gryka e Këlcyra (in ancient times known as Fauces Antigonenses), is a gorge with a spectacular view near the city of Këlcyra.

This magnificent gorge which stretches between Këlcyra and Dragot with a length of 13 km forms a canyon whose depth reaches up to 1,000 meters.

On the right slope of the gorge, there are the caves of Mezhgoran and Dragot, while along the river you can admire many underground springs, among which we single out the Black Water of Këlcyra which comes to the surface on the edge of the bed of the Vjosa river, creating a variety of colors.

Of special beauty are the karst springs of the area called "Rrepet e Këlcyrës", an object that functions as a tourist point, which come to the surface at a height of about 50 m above the bed of the Vjosa river, creating wonderful waterfalls.

Pogradec city  After a short drive, the broad lake appeared behind the purview of a mountain ridge: a vast range of navy...
11/02/2023

Pogradec city

After a short drive, the broad lake appeared behind the purview of a mountain ridge: a vast range of navy blue under an azure sky, surrounded by majestic, boundless, snow-capped mountain ranges. It is an exquisite feeling when the first sunny day in a while coincides with approaching a coast again after some time. The road meandered down the slope, from above to below a couple of picturesque villages, and met the water. We drove down all along Ochrid Lake’s western coast until it curved in an easterly direction. There lay the city of Pogradec. Pogradec’s inhabitants seemed to be experiencing the same emotions as us regarding this beautiful day. The streets were full of people strolling and enjoying the dazzling sunshine. Kids were playing rambunctiously with the freshly fallen snow. We stayed in Pogradec for a good few hours, perambulating along the lakeshore and through the city’s various neighborhoods, taking plenty of pictures upon our passage. We then settled under the blazing heat lamp of a cute cafe for a cup of coffee and a hot chocolate. And in the afternoon, after grabbing a quick gyros, we left the city to head further south.

The Elbasan Castle: The haven of Albanian history, culture and language throughout centuriesForeign travelers in the ‘80...
15/11/2022

The Elbasan Castle: The haven of Albanian history, culture and language throughout centuries
Foreign travelers in the ‘800s noted that cities like Elbasan no longer existed in Europe. Indeed, this is a rare town! Skampis, as this fortress-town was once called, was founded in 1466 by two strikingly different leaders: the Roman emperor Justinian and Sultan Mehmet the Second. The two-thousand-year-old Castle of Elbasan, a Roman construction built as early as the 3rd century B.C., once surrounded the entire city, which stretched over an area of approximately 10 hectares. After it was nearly entirely destroyed during the wars of the 4th and 5th centuries, the castle walls were erected once more by Justinian in order to be used as a military shelter as well as to oversee the famous Via Egnatia, the main road which stretched across major cities of the Roman Empire. Later, during the Ottoman Empire, Mehmet the Second, intended to use this castle as the base of his military operations against Skanderbeg, the national Albanian hero who fought to gain Albania’s independence from the Ottoman Empire. Instead, the castle swiftly became the center of Albanian nationalism.

The Castle of Elbasan had its most glorious period during the 17th century, enclosing within its walls more than two thousand houses and boasting a manufacturing industry of more than 900 shops of leather crafts including silk, as well as precious metals, such as silver, which were mostly exported abroad. Only after 100 years after the Ottoman invasion, the city saw its life begin to extend beyond the castle walls. Today, the “city” within the walls is called the Castle Neighborhood, one of the very few in Albania that still contains many residences that continue harmoniously coexisting with the past. From the original castle built in the 3rd century, only the southern gate remains but this place still contains many other monuments built throughout the following centuries. Each of the monuments within the fortress, such as the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church of St. Mary’s Assumption, the old school of the castle, the King’s Mosque and the women’s hamam, the Clock Tower or any house and alley within this castle, contains significant bits of this city’s fascinating history. On the eastern side of the castle gates, stands the majestic Clock Tower, which still functions impeccably. Built in the late ‘800s, it was declared a monument of culture in 1963.

In the Albanian cities of the late Middle Ages, public monuments and religious institutions were built in very close proximity to one another, a phenomenon that did not exist in other cities of the Ottoman Empire. The center of the castle neighborhood hosts the Church of St. Mary’s Assumption as well as many homes of Islamic believers who regularly visit the King’s Mosque. At the time, Albanian cities introduced an unprecedented religious tolerance which still continues to this day!

The Castle of Elbasan also honors the prominent figures in the progress of Albanian language and culture such as Kostantin Kristoforidhi, who gave Albanians their first elementary school textbook in Albanian and the first Albanian translation of the Old Testament, as well as the founders of the Albanian Academy of Sciences. A walk through the rest of the castle reveals an astounding variation of beautiful architecture: Ottoman-style houses, typical of central Albania, Italian-style flats of the 19th and 20th centuries, and communist as well as post-communist era buildings. Through destructions and reconstructions throughout centuries, this castle has somehow retained all the epochs, emperors, stories, cultures and religions that have dwelled inside its walls!

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