Albania 7 Day Itinerary: Tirana, Berat, Gjirokastër and the Riviera

Allow 45 minutes, it is free, and it is 25 minutes from the airport by taxi. The square was closed to cars in 2017 and became a stone esplanade, with the National History Museum on one side and the equestrian statue of Skanderbeg at the centre.

It is the best place to grasp the scale of the city before walking: everything you see today is less than 15 minutes away on foot.

Free entry, 30 minutes, closed during prayers. Take your shoes off and cover your shoulders.

Built between 1789 and 1823, it is one of the few mosques the Enver Hoxha regime did not demolish when it declared Albania the world's first officially atheist state in 1967. The interior frescoes, showing trees, waterfalls and bridges, are rare in the Islamic world, where figurative imagery is usually avoided.

A 15 minute stop, no ticket, on the way between the square and the Pyramid. The eighteenth century stone bridge once crossed the Lana river so tanners could drive cattle to market. The river was diverted and the bridge now spans a lawn, which is the most honest image of what Tirana has done with its own past.

Free to climb, no ticket, 45 minutes. Go late in the day: the view from the top catches the sunset over Mount Dajti.

Opened in 1988 as a museum to Enver Hoxha and designed by the dictator's daughter, it spent 30 years derelict and covered in graffiti. In 2023 the Dutch practice MVRDV reopened it with external steps anyone can climb and coloured boxes housing the TUMO technology centre.

Blloku, the district where only the party elite could live until 1991, starts two blocks west and is where the bars open at night.

Around 700 lek, 75 minutes, closed on Mondays. It is the most powerful museum in Tirana and the least visited.

The villa was built in 1931 as a maternity clinic and became, in 1944, the headquarters of the Sigurimi secret police. The museum kept the equipment in place: wiretaps, microphones hidden inside household objects, wall cameras, and the files recording who informed on whom. The name comes from the ivy covering the facade.

Around 900 lek, 90 minutes, entered through a concrete dome on the pavement beside the Clock Tower. It is a 5 minute walk from the House of Leaves, so both fit into one morning.

Twenty four rooms of the bunker built for the Interior Ministry, devoted to the history of the political police and to the thousands of Albanians executed by the regime. If you only have time for one of the two bunkers, choose this one for the content and the other for the scale.

Around 900 lek, 2 hours, on the north eastern edge of the city. Take a taxi: it is 25 minutes from the centre.

This is the real bunker: 106 rooms on five levels, dug into the mountain between 1972 and 1978 to shelter Hoxha and the high command from a nuclear attack that never came. Albania ended the communist period with more than 170,000 bunkers across its territory. Some of the rooms now hold contemporary art installations.

Around 1,000 lek return, a 15 minute ride, closed on Tuesdays. The lower station is 10 minutes from the previous bunker, which turns the two into a single afternoon.

The cable car climbs 800 metres to Mount Dajti National Park, from where the whole of Tirana is visible. At the top there are short trails and restaurants with terraces, and on a clear day you can see the Adriatic.

Leave Tirana around 8.30am: it is a 2 hour 30 minute drive to Berat. Tickets cost around 400 lek, and the visit takes 90 minutes.

What sets the Kala apart from any other castle in the Balkans is that it was never emptied: families live inside the thirteenth century walls, there is washing on the lines and cats on the steps. The cobbled climb is steep and gets slippery in rain, so closed shoes help.

Around 400 lek, 45 minutes, inside the castle, in the Church of the Dormition of St Mary.

Onufri was a sixteenth century icon painter who created a red pigment so intense it came to carry his name and has never been reproduced. The church's gilded iconostasis is what impresses most up close.

No ticket, 1 hour, walking down from the castle. This is where the classic photograph of Berat is taken.

The white Ottoman houses of the eighteenth century were built stepped up the slope so that none blocks another's window, and seen from the river the effect is a wall of glass. That is where the nickname, the city of a thousand windows, comes from. The quarter has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2008.

No ticket, 40 minutes including the walk across.

The seven arch stone bridge was raised in 1780 and links Mangalem to Gorica, the Christian quarter, quieter and without shops. The best angle on Mangalem is from here in late afternoon, when the sun hits the windows head on.

A 20 minute stop at one of the roadside viewpoints, about 2 hours from Berat. There is no infrastructure, just the valley.

The Vjosa is the last large undammed river in Europe and became a national park in 2023, the first on the continent created to protect an entire river. On the descent to Tepelenë it spreads into several braids across white gravel, and the road follows the Këlcyra gorge just before.

Around 400 lek, 90 minutes. The castle is the highest point in the city, so start there and walk down for the rest of the day.

The fortress holds an open air artillery gallery and the wreckage of an American aircraft the regime displayed as a spying trophy. From the terrace you can see the whole Drino valley.

Around 300 lek, 45 minutes, a short steep climb from the bazaar.

Built in 1812 by a treasurer to Ali Pasha, it has three floors, twin towers and a top floor reception hall with a carved ceiling and painted niches. It is the most complete example of the fortified Gjirokastër house, designed to withstand a siege and receive guests at the same time.

No ticket, 1 hour, walking down from the castle. This is where the cafes and the fabric shops are.

The seventeenth century bazaar was rebuilt after a fire in the nineteenth century and keeps its wooden shopfronts along streets that meet at an angle. Gjirokastër is called the stone city because the roofs are laid with grey slate, and from here you see that close up.

Around 50 lek per person plus 200 per car, 1 hour including the walk. Leave Gjirokastër at 9.30am: it is 50 minutes away.

The water rises from a fissure more than 50 metres deep and divers have never reached the end of the conduit. The centre is dark blue and the rim pale green, which gives the eye shape that names the place. The temperature stays at 10 degrees all year: some people get in, most give up.

No ticket for the courtyard, 75 minutes, up a narrow road. Arrive 40 minutes before sunset.

The castle was built by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1537 to control the channel between Sarandë and the Greek island of Corfu, 10 kilometres away and visible end to end on the horizon. What remains are the walls and a restaurant in the courtyard, and what you come for is the view over the bay.

Around 1,000 lek, 2 hours 30 minutes, opens at 8am. Go early: after 11am the coach tours arrive from Corfu and the theatre fills up.

Butrint was a Greek colony, a Roman city, a Byzantine bishopric and a Venetian fort, and each layer settled over the previous one without erasing it. The third century BC theatre still carries manumission inscriptions cut into the stone, and the early Christian baptistery has an animal mosaic that stays covered most of the year to keep it from degrading.

The site sits inside a lagoon, so bring insect repellent.

Public beach with paid loungers, 3 hours, 20 minutes from Butrint on the way back to Sarandë.

The four islets of Ksamil lie a hundred metres offshore and can be reached by swimming or kayak, in shallow, genuinely turquoise water. The caveat is the crowding: in July and August the sand disappears under the loungers, and the same place in June or September is another thing entirely.

Leave Sarandë at 9am: it is 1 hour 30 minutes to Himarë on the coast road. Stop for an hour.

Himarë is a village with a Greek Albanian population and pebble beaches of clear water just below the centre. Potami is the most accessible, with parking and bars on the sand, and works as a first stop before the more hidden beaches further north.

No ticket, 1 hour, 20 minutes north of Himarë. Park in the upper village, not at the beach.

The Dhërmi that appears in summer photographs is on the coast, but the original village sits 200 metres above it, with stone houses and frescoed Byzantine churches, almost empty outside August. It is worth more for the view down the slope to the sea than for the beach, which you have already seen at Himarë.

No ticket, a 45 minute stop, 30 minutes from Dhërmi. From here it is 3 hours 30 minutes to Tirana, so allow room before your flight.

The road climbs in tight bends to 1,027 metres inside Llogara National Park, between pines bent by the wind, and the viewpoint delivers the whole Riviera below. This is where the Ionian meets the Adriatic, and the change in the colour of the water is visible to the naked eye.