On the Rise
We had heard the warnings before we drove south from Vlorë: that the Albanian Riviera was already gone, paved over by its own success. The truth is more interesting. It is a coast in the middle of becoming something, and you can still see both versions of it at once — the empty Ionian cove and the crane on the headland above it.
The pivot point was infrastructure. In July 2024 Albania opened the Llogara Tunnel, 5.9 kilometres bored through the mountain that long sealed off the south, the longest tunnel in the country. The old Llogara pass was spectacular and slow; the tunnel cuts the crossing from around thirty minutes to seven and pulls the beaches at Dhërmi, Himarë and Ksamil within easy reach of Vlorë. The effect was immediate.
A whole coastline was, in effect, moved closer to the world in the time it takes to drill a hole through a mountain.
The numbers are startling for a country of under three million. Albania drew 11.7 million visitors in 2024, and the Riviera absorbed much of the surge — Sarandë and Ksamil now contend with crowded beaches and hotel construction that has outrun planning. This is the honest part of the recommendation: the south is busy, and busier each year.
And yet the water is still the clearest in this corner of the Mediterranean, the prices still gentler than Corfu an hour's ferry away, the inland villages of stone and citrus still unbothered. The pleasure now is in calibration — Dhërmi in June rather than August, a morning swim before the day-trippers, dinner where the catch is grilled by the people who landed it.
We would go this year. Not because the Riviera is at its peak, but because it is at a hinge: open enough to enjoy, not yet smoothed into anywhere else. A planned international airport at Vlorë may change the maths again — its commercial opening has slipped repeatedly and remains unconfirmed — but the coast is not waiting for it.