10 Days in Albania: Tirana, Durrës, Sarandë and the Honest Truth About Europe’s Cheapest Coastline
Albania kept showing up on our radar for months before we actually booked it. Every reel made it look like the next Santorini, minus the crowds and minus the price tag. So we landed in Tirana with zero expectations and ten days on the clock, planning to split our time between the capital, the coast near Durrës, and the Riviera town of Sarandë.
Here’s the honest version of that trip, what worked, what didn’t, what we’d skip, and exactly what it cost.
Quick verdict: 6.5/10. Beautiful, cheap, and safe. Just don’t go for the food, and read the bit about police checkpoints before you rent a car. Also read: How Much Does a Trip to Europe Actually Cost?(2026 Honest Breakdown)
Quick Index:
Day 1-2: Landing in Tirana
We flew into Tirana International Airport (TIA), about a 20-minute drive from the city centre. A taxi runs roughly €20-25, though Bolt is cheaper if you have data on arrival.
Tirana doesn’t need a car. You can walk most of it. Here’s what we covered in two days of sightseeing:
Skanderbeg Square: the city’s main square, dominated by the statue of Albania’s national hero on horseback. Good starting point for everything else.
Skanderbeg Square, Tirana Et’hem Bey Mosque: small, beautiful, and free to enter. A nice contrast right next to the National History Museum.
National History Museum: the giant mosaic on the building’s facade is reason enough to walk past, even if you skip the inside.
Clock Tower of Tirana — climb it for a few euros and get a rooftop view over the square.
The Pyramid of Tirana — a leftover Communist-era structure, recently renovated into a youth tech and culture centre. Worth a quick stop for the photos alone.
Bunk’Art 1 and Bunk’Art 2 — this is the bunker everyone talks about, and it’s genuinely one of the best things we did in Albania. Bunk’Art 2 sits right in the city centre inside an old anti-nuclear bunker and walks you through Albania’s secret police history under communism. Bunk’Art 1 is a bigger underground complex on the city’s edge, originally built as a shelter for the dictator Enver Hoxha. Entry is around €3-5 per site. Don’t skip this as it’s the most interesting few hours you’ll spend in Tirana.
Bunk art 1, Tirana Blloku district: the old “forbidden zone” reserved for Communist-era elites, now Tirana’s trendiest neighbourhood full of cafes and bars. Good for an evening walk and dinner.
Two days felt about right for Tirana as it's enough to see everything without rushing.
Day 3: Durrës
A short drive (or bus) from Tirana, Durrës is Albania’s main port city and beach town. We used it as our coastal base before heading south. The Durrës Amphitheatre, a Roman-era ruin sitting right in the middle of the modern city, is worth the half-hour visit. Beyond that, it’s mostly about the beach promenade and seafood by the water.
If your trip is shorter than ten days, Durrës is the one stop you could trim, it’s pleasant but not essential compared to what’s further south.
Day 4: Picking up the rental car
This is where we’d push back hard on any advice that says “just take the bus.” Rent a car. Albania’s public transport (mostly shared minivans called furgons) is patchy, slow, and unreliable on schedule. A car gave us full control of the itinerary, and frankly, the country is made for road trips, mountains on one side, coastline on the other.
Cost: expect to pay anywhere from €20-25/day off-season to €35-45/day in July-August for a small/mid-size car. Book ahead in summer; prices spike fast closer to the date.
A few honest things to know before you drive:
Roads are decent, not great. Highways between major cities are fine. Mountain stretches (especially toward Gjirokastër and the Blue Eye) get narrow and winding, but nothing a normal car can’t handle.
Police checkpoints are everywhere, and they will stop you for the smallest things, a slightly faded lane marking, a “rolling stop,” anything. From our experience and from what other travellers report, a lot of these stops end with the officer suggesting you can “settle it” with cash on the spot, often somewhere in the €10-20 range, rather than issuing a formal ticket. We’re not telling you what to do here, but just flagging that this is a real and common experience on Albanian roads, so don’t be caught off guard, keep some small euro notes handy, and always know your documents are in order. (Honestly, we we're stopped thrice and got away with €5 each time).
Day 5: The Blue Eye (Syri i Kaltër)
This was the standout experience of the whole trip. The Blue Eye is a natural spring about 30-40 minutes from Sarandë, with water so clear and blue it genuinely looks artificial. The drive there is one of the easier ones in the south which is fully paved except the last stretch into the parking lot.
Practical bits:
Entrance fee: around 50 LEK per person (roughly €0.50), yes, that low.
Parking: roughly 200-300 LEK (€2-3) for a few hours, cash only.
From the parking lot, it’s about a 20-30 minute walk to the spring itself.
Our tip, and this is the one thing we’d tell every traveller: skip the walk and rent an electric scooter/e-bike at the entrance. It’s around €5-10 and turns a hot, dusty 30-minute trudge into a breezy 20-minute ride through the nature reserve. Genuinely one of the most fun small details of the entire trip.
Swimming in the Blue Eye itself is officially banned (though people still do it), but you can dip into the cold river running from it.
Go early if you’re visiting in summer, by mid-morning the parking lot fills up and the path gets crowded.
Day 6-8: Sarandë
Sarandë is Albania’s main Riviera town, and it’s where we settled in for a proper few days by the sea. The town itself is built for a slow walk along the promenade, cafes, gelato stands, and a long stretch of waterfront facing directly across to Greece.
The big one here: you can see Corfu, Greece, from Sarandë’s coastline, and the ferry across takes roughly 25-40 minutes depending on the operator and season. Ticket prices generally run €15-40 one way (cheaper deck tickets exist on some routes, more for high-speed services or if you’re bringing a car). It’s an easy half-day or full-day trip if you want to say you’ve hopped between two countries in an afternoon.
Real talk on the food: this is the one place we have to be blunt. Even staying at a proper all-inclusive resort, the food was consistently average at best, repetitive buffets, nothing that felt distinctly Albanian or memorable. If you’re a food-first traveller, Albania is not going to be the trip that wows you on that front. Go for the scenery, the price, and the beaches but not the cuisine. Maybe it was only us, but you might feel different. Honestly, we GORGED ourselves on a simple McDonalds once we we're back in Dublin.
Day 9: Gjirokastër
A worthwhile day trip (or overnight) from Sarandë, Gjirokastër is a UNESCO-listed “museum city” of stone houses stacked up a hillside, topped by a massive hilltop castle.
After the beaches and the ferry crowds, Gjirokastër felt like a different country. This whole hillside town is built from the same grey stone, with steep slate roofed houses climbing up toward a massive hilltop castle. We spent a morning wandering the Old Bazaar, just narrow cobbled lanes and small shops selling copperware, and then made the climb up to the castle. It's one of the biggest in the Balkans, and the view back down over the rooftops is worth the walk alone. There's also a small museum inside with a US fighter jet that was shot down during the Cold War, which felt completely random in the middle of an old fortress.
It's an easy day trip from Sarandë/Durres, and since it sits roughly on the way to the Blue Eye, it's worth slotting in if you're already driving that route. No beach, no nightlife, just old stone streets and a slower pace for a few hours. It was one of our favourite stops simply because it felt so different from everywhere else on the coast.A couple of other places worth knowing about
We didn’t get to everything, but if you’re planning your own itinerary, these are commonly recommended additions worth slotting in if you have the days:
Berat: another UNESCO town, known as the “City of a Thousand Windows,” roughly between Tirana and the south coast.
Butrint: ancient ruins near Sarandë, a UNESCO archaeological site that’s an easy half-day add-on.
Ksamil: a small beach town just south of Sarandë, known for some of the clearest water on the Albanian coast.
Two ways to do Albania
By the end of the trip, it was clear there are really two completely different ways to approach this country:
The explorer route, which is what we did. Rent a car, move around, hit the cities, the bunker, the Blue Eye, the ferry to Corfu, the old towns. More driving, more planning, more variety.
The pure beach-resort route, pick one all-inclusive resort on the Riviera and just stay on the beach beds for a week. If this is your plan, you don’t even need to fly into Tirana or fly into Corfu, Greece, and take the short ferry across to Sarandë instead. Often easier and cheaper on flights, especially from outside Europe.
Either approach works. They’re just very different trips.
Cost snapshot (per person/unit, approximate)
Item | Cost |
Car rental (per day) | €20-45 depending on season |
Blue Eye entrance | €0.50 |
Blue Eye e-bike rental | €5-10 |
Sarandë–Corfu ferry (one way) | €15-40 |
Bunk’Art entry | €3-5 each |
Tirana taxi from airport | €20-25 |
“Checkpoint settlement” buffer | keep €10-20 cash spare, just in case |
The bottom line
Albania is cheap, it’s safe, and it’s genuinely beautiful, as the Blue Eye alone is worth the trip. It’s not a food destination, the police checkpoints are an odd but real part of road-tripping here, and ten days felt like the right amount of time to see the highlights without rushing.
Our rating: 6.5/10. Worth visiting, especially before it gets as crowded (and as expensive) as the rest of the Mediterranean. Just go in with the right expectations.
Real trips, real budgets, zero hidden sponsors, that’s the RoamMantics way. Happy Travels!
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