Prado Luxury Hotel

Most of the new building on the Albanian Riviera went up fast and without much thought. Prado is the exception on this stretch of the Ionian, and the idea behind it is simple enough to read from the beach. Each floor is pulled back from the one beneath it, so the building steps up the slope in terraces rather than rising as a flat wall. The point of that is the balcony. All fifty-seven rooms get one, open to the sky above rather than tucked under the floor overhead, and turned to the sea. The palette is pale stone and a lot of glass, cool to look at under a hard Himarë sun. It stands on the shingle at Livadh, a little north of the town, the beach starting where the building stops and the green hills of the Ceraunians climbing behind.

The table

Dinner is at a sea-facing restaurant that leans Mediterranean, with a separate sushi bar for the evenings when raw fish and a cold glass make more sense than a full plate. Two more bars, one at the pool and one down on the sand, tell you the kind of long summer day the place is built around. This is cooking for a holiday rather than a pilgrimage, generous and well turned out, and best taken late with the light going pink over the water. Breakfast runs long, and no one hurries you off the terrace.

Why it's in VANE

Himarë is the quieter half of this coast, less built than Dhërmi or Sarandë, still tied to the old Greek-speaking villages in the hills above it. Prado reads as a proper piece of design in a place that mostly lacks one, and the terraced section is a real idea rather than a facade trick. It is a sizeable hotel with a beach club at its feet, and in August the sand in front of it fills up. We will not pretend otherwise. Come either side of high summer, take a room high in the stack for the longest run of sea, and the architecture does the rest. For the wider picture of this coast finding its feet, see our field note from Gjirokastër.

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