[ DISCOVERY · THE DISPATCH ]

Albania Is What Italy Was 40 Years Ago and the Window Is Closing Fast

The Albanian Riviera is the Adriatic coast nobody has priced yet — turquoise water, €4 seafood, empty beaches. I'll tell you exactly where to go, and the honest reasons it won't stay this cheap.

I want to talk about Albania travel before crowds, and I want to do it before the window slams shut, because it is closing, and faster than people think.

Picture the Italian coast in the 1980s. Cheap. A bit rough at the edges. Empty coves where a family runs the only taverna and grills whatever the boat brought in. Water so clear it looks fake. That’s the Albanian Riviera right now, in 2026, and I keep telling friends and I keep getting the same blank look. Albania? Isn’t that… I don’t know. Dodgy?

No. It’s just the last cheap stretch of the Adriatic. And it has no idea how good it is yet, which is the entire magic.

I first saw the cove at Gjipe and actually said something out loud, alone, like an idiot. It’s a beach you reach by a 30-minute walk down a canyon or by boat, and the water is that impossible glass-green-turquoise that you assume is a filter. There were maybe fifteen people. In peak July.

Down the coast at Dhërmi and Drymades the beaches are pebbly, the sea drops off fast and stays cold enough to gasp, and the beach bars play music a touch too loud — but a sunbed and umbrella set runs about €8 for the day. Eight. In Croatia that’s a small fortune and a fight for space.

And the food. Oh, the food. A whole grilled sea bream, salad, bread, and a half-litre of the house white at a place in Himarë cost me — I checked the reciept twice — around €11. The owner’s mother does the cooking. There is no menu in the modern sense, just what’s good today.

Skip Sarandë. I’ll be the unpopular one here. Sarandë is the big name, the one the cruise daytrippers hit, and it’s already got the half-built concrete-tower energy of a place that grew too fast. It’s fine. It’s just not why you came.

Base yourself in Himarë or Dhërmi instead. Himarë is a proper small town with an old quarter up the hill, a working harbour, and enough restaurants that you won’t repeat yourself. Dhërmi is smaller, more beach-village, better if you mostly want to swim and read. Either one, you’re a short hop from the best coves.

And one inland detour you must not skip: Gjirokastër, a stone Ottoman town up in the hills, UNESCO-listed, with a brooding castle and cobbled lanes that genuinely do feel like time travel. Stay a night. It breaks up the beach blur.

Here’s where I have to be straight with you, because every “go before the crowds” article conveniently forgets the “why.”

The window is closing for concrete, measurable reasons. There’s a new international airport going in at Vlorë, which puts the northern Riviera within a cheap two-hour flight of half of Europe. The coastal road is being widened. Big hotel groups have already bought land — I saw the boards. The government openly wants ten-million-plus tourists, and the EU accession talk only accelerates everything.

What that means in plain terms: the €11 sea bream becomes €22. The €8 sunbed becomes €20. The empty cove at Gjipe gets a paved car park and a ticket booth. It’s not a maybe. It’s a when, and the when is soon.

I’m not saying this to be gloomy. Development isn’t a tragedy and locals deserve the money. But if you want the version where you stumble into a family taverna and the grandmother feeds you too much for the price of a sandwich back home — that version has maybe two, three more summers. Tops.

The roads are improving but driving is, let’s say, expressive. Albanians overtake on faith. Stay calm, leave space, don’t be the foreigner racing them.

Cash is king once you leave the towns. Card machines exist and then suddenly, mysteriously, don’t. Carry lek.

People are extraordinarily kind to visitors, sometimes startlingly so — I got waved into a stranger’s family lunch near Qeparo and could not talk my way out of it (didn’t try very hard). That generosity is the thing the brochures will never capture and the thing that vanishes first when a place gets used to tourists as ATMs.

Shoulder season — June or September — is the move. July and August the coast does fill, mostly with Albanians and Kosovars on their own holidays, and the water gets bath-warm and the bars get rowdy. June, the sea’s a little fresh but the place is half-empty and half-price.

I’ve sent four sets of friends now. Every single one came back slightly evangelical, the way I am being at you right now. That’s the tell. That’s how you know a place hasn’t been ruined yet — when people return unable to shut up about it.

Go this summer or next. Rent the car, base in Himarë, eat the fish, and don’t tell too many people — though by writing this I suppose I’ve rather blown that, haven’t I.

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