Saranda & the Albanian Riviera

About this pack

A 6-day mid-range trip to Saranda, Albania, taking in Ksamil Islands, Blue Eye Spring, Lëkurësi Castle and Butrint ruins.

Inside the Saranda & the Albanian Riviera trip

Saranda & the Albanian Riviera opens on the Ksamil Islands, off the village of Ksamil on the riviera of southern Albania, within Butrint National Park and, since the 2015 local government reform, a subdivision of the municipality of Sarandë. The coastal village itself was built during the communist era, in 1966, on the road south of Sarandë toward Butrint, and its white-sand beaches — likened in coverage to Caribbean shorelines and featured in the Guardian's 2013 roundup of bargain beach holidays — have driven a wave of tourism that has brought new hotels and, with them, rising prices. The population, recorded at 2,731 in the 2023 census, includes a historically mixed community of Albanians, Greeks and a small number of Aromanians, and the small islands just offshore remain the area's principal draw for both domestic and international visitors.

A short distance inland, the Blue Eye — Syri i Kaltër in Albanian — is a water spring and karst phenomenon in the village of Muzinë in Finiq municipality, where clear blue water is visible from a depth of more than fifty metres even though divers who have descended that far still cannot confirm the hole's true depth. It is the source of the 25-kilometre Bistricë river, which empties into the Ionian Sea south of Sarandë, emerging at an altitude of 152 metres with a discharge rate of 18,400 litres per second. The surrounding 1.8 square kilometres has been designated a Nature Monument, shaded by oak and sycamore, though the spring dried up briefly in the summer of 2004 and part of the surrounding area was burned by wildfire in 2017.

Above Sarandë itself stands Lëkurësi Castle, a ruined Ottoman fortress about a kilometre southeast of the town centre on a hill point that commands views over the town, the Ksamil islands and the Straits of Corfu. Built in 1537 by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent to guard against the Venetians, the almost-square structure with two round corner towers once held a garrison of 220 soldiers; it was attacked at the end of the 18th century by Ali Pasha of Ioannina, and in early 1878 it was the site of a siege during an Albanian–Greek conflict, when Greek rebels who had taken refuge inside after clashing with Albanian locals in the surrounding villages were ultimately defeated.

The final and largest stop is Butrint, an archaeological site in Vlorë County some 14 kilometres south of Sarandë, near the Greek border, set on a hill above the Vivari Channel within Butrint National Park. Originally a settlement of the Chaonian tribe, it developed as a Greek port city — one of two serving lower Chaonia, alongside Onchesmos, today's Sarandë — before becoming a Roman colonia founded in 44 BC under Julius Caesar and later expanded under Augustus with an aqueduct, baths, a forum and a nymphaeum after his victory at Actium in 31 BC. Legend traced its founding to Helenus, son of the Trojan king Priam, and both Virgil and the historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus record that Aeneas visited the city after fleeing Troy.

Butrint went on to serve as an early Christian bishopric within Epirus, was fortified and rebuilt repeatedly through the Byzantine and Angevin periods, and was eventually abandoned in the Middle Ages after a major earthquake flooded much of the site — leaving behind ruins that today rank among the most important archaeological remains in Albania. It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992 and became a National Park in 2000, its Roman theatre, temple of Asklepeios, and the later Triconch Palace of around 425 all still traceable across the hillside — a fitting close to a route that has already moved from island beaches through a mountain spring, a hilltop Ottoman castle and, finally, into more than two thousand years of layered history at Butrint.

• Ksamil — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Blue Eye, Albania — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Lëkurësi Castle — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Butrint — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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