Petrel

Famous Landmarks in Albania: 6 Sites Worth Seeing

Five days down a country that was sealed off from the world until 1991 and is now the Mediterranean's least-spoiled coastline: a capital painted in deliberate colour, an Ottoman hillside town of stacked windows, and a Riviera of clear water backed by mountains that fall straight into it. See the full itinerary.

From the same hand-researched library as our Albania itinerary. Last reviewed 2026-08-08.

Tirana

A capital that spent forty-five years under one of the most isolated dictatorships in Europe, then had a mayor who painted the grey apartment blocks in bright patterns to make people believe change was real. The bunkers built against an invasion that never came are now museums, and the result is a city that is genuinely strange and increasingly good.

1
Et'hem Bey Mosque
A late-eighteenth-century mosque with frescoes of trees and waterfalls, unusual in Islamic art. It survived the atheist campaign that demolished most religious buildings and reopened in 1991 when ten thousand people walked in without permission.
Tirana
2
Pyramid of Tirana
Built in 1988 as a museum to Enver Hoxha, later a nightclub and a NATO base, left derelict for decades and reopened in 2023 as a youth tech centre you can walk up the outside of.
Tirana
3
House of Leaves
The former secret police surveillance headquarters, now a museum of how the Sigurimi listened to the country. Small, cold, and the most affecting hour in Tirana.
Tirana

Berat

The City of a Thousand Windows: an Ottoman hillside town of white houses stacked so their windows appear to sit on each other's roofs, UNESCO-listed, with a castle above that is still an inhabited neighbourhood rather than a monument. Families have lived inside those walls continuously for centuries.

4
Berat Castle
A thirteenth-century citadel that is also a living village, with Byzantine churches, an Ottoman mosque ruin, and residents' laundry lines between them. Enter on foot up the cobbles.
Berat

Sarandë and the Albanian Riviera

The Ionian coast, facing Corfu across a narrow strait, with water as clear as anywhere in the Mediterranean and a Greek and Roman city in the marshes south of town. The coast road north over the Llogara Pass drops from 1,000m of mountain forest straight to the sea in a series of switchbacks that is the single best drive in the country.

5
Butrint
A UNESCO-listed city with Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, and Ottoman layers stacked on one wooded peninsula: a theatre, a baptistery mosaic, and a lion gate. The lower city floods seasonally, so some walkways close in winter and early spring.
Sarandë and the Albanian Riviera
6
Porto Palermo Castle
A triangular fortress on a causeway in a near-enclosed bay, built for Ali Pasha, with a Cold War submarine tunnel cut into the headland beside it.
Sarandë and the Albanian Riviera

Museums, parks, and neighborhoods are on the full Albania itinerary, sequenced into a realistic day-by-day plan with transport between cities.

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