The Most Beautiful Places in Albania
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Albania are Butrint, Blue Eye (Syri i Kaltër) and Gjirokastër Fortress. The list covers 5 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Albania's limestone mountains run almost to the sea, and for most of the 20th century the country was sealed off from the outside world, which left its landscapes and old towns little touched by mass development. Its history runs deep: Greek colonists, Romans, Byzantines, Venetians and Ottomans all held this stretch of the Adriatic and Ionian coast, and karst geology feeds its rivers with springs of startling clarity.
Butrint, near the Greek border, is the richest archaeological site in the country. On a wooded peninsula beside a lagoon, a Greek theatre, a Roman forum, an early Christian baptistery with a mosaic floor and Venetian walls sit within a short walk of each other, a whole span of Mediterranean history in one place. Inland, Gjirokastër Fortress commands an Ottoman town of tall stone houses roofed with grey stone slabs.
The natural places are defined by water. The Blue Eye, Syri i Kaltër, is a karst spring where water wells up from a deep shaft, deep blue at the centre and turquoise at the edges, so cold and clear that divers have never reached its bottom. In the north, Lake Koman is a long reservoir on the Drin that winds through a narrow mountain gorge, so that the ferry journey along it feels like a river voyage between cliffs. Near Berat, the Osum Canyon cuts through limestone with waterfalls spilling down its walls in spring.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Butrint | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 2 | Blue Eye (Syri i Kaltër) | Karst spring | |
| 3 | Gjirokastër Fortress | Fortress | |
| 4 | Lake Koman | Reservoir | |
| 5 | Osum Canyon | Canyon |
01 Butrint
Albania · 13.4 km from Saranda39.757° N 20.017° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Robs123 from Pixabay Butrint sits on a hill above the Vivari Channel, close to the Straits of Corfu, and in one walk you pass through some 2,500 years of Mediterranean history: a Greek theatre, Roman baths, a Byzantine baptistery, a Venetian fortress and the castle of Ali Pasha.
Did you know? The defensive wall of around 380 BC had bastions and five gates.
02 Blue Eye (Syri i Kaltër)
Syri i Kaltër
Albania · 17.7 km from Gjirokastër39.924° N 20.193° E
Holger Adams · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Blue Eye is a hole in the bottom of a river from which the river is born. In a wooded valley near the village of Muzinë in southern Albania, water wells up from a karst shaft so deep that no one yet knows its true depth: divers have gone down more than fifty metres without finding the bottom.
Did you know? The river it feeds once flowed into Lake Butrint, but in 1958 it was diverted along an artificial channel straight to the Ionian Sea.
03 Gjirokastër Fortress
Kalaja e Gjirokastrës
Albania · 0.9 km from Gjirokastër40.074° N 20.141° E
ShkelzenRexha · CC BY-SA 4.0 The long stone hull of Gjirokastër Fortress rides the crest of a ridge above one of the best-preserved Ottoman towns in the Balkans, with the Drino valley spread out below.
Did you know? The Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi, visiting in 1672, counted about 200 houses lining a broad street inside the castle walls.
04 Lake Koman
Liqeni i Komanit
Albania · 20.6 km from Pukë42.219° N 19.899° E
Marie Čcheidzeová · CC BY-SA 4.0 Lake Koman looks less like a reservoir than a fjord that has wandered south into the Albanian Alps. For much of its length the water fills a narrow valley completely, hemmed in by forested hills and sheer rock walls, and at its tightest gorge the vertical cliffs stand only a little more than fifty metres apart.
Did you know? Koman is the middle link of a three-dam cascade on the Drin, with the Fierza dam upstream and the Vau i Dejës dam downstream.
05 Osum Canyon
Kanionet e Osumit
Albania · 5.5 km from Çorovodë40.470° N 20.255° E
Arbenllapashtica · CC BY-SA 4.0 5 metres apart at river level in places and nowhere open much wider than 35 metres. Over some 26 km the river Osum has carved six especially narrow sections, between which the cliffs are pocked with caves and hollows and, in spring, streaked by waterfalls that pour over the rim into the gorge.
Did you know? Vrima e Nuses, the Bride's Hole, is a small karst cave about 8 metres long, tied to a legend of a bride fleeing a forced marriage.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Albania?
- On our list, Butrint ranks first, followed by Blue Eye (Syri i Kaltër) and Gjirokastër Fortress.
- How deep is the Blue Eye spring?
- Its true depth is unknown. Divers have descended more than 50 metres into the shaft without reaching the bottom, and the force of the rising water makes deeper exploration difficult.
- Why is Gjirokastër called the City of Stone?
- Its Ottoman-era houses are built of stone and roofed with thin slabs of grey stone instead of tiles, giving the whole hillside town a uniform grey texture. It is on the UNESCO list together with Berat.
- Is Lake Koman a natural lake?
- No. It is a reservoir created by a dam on the Drin River, which flooded a deep gorge and turned it into a long, narrow lake between mountain walls.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Albania?
- In our collection, the places in Albania are most often canyons and gorges (1), karst springs (1), reservoirs (1) and fortresses (1).
- How many places are on this list in Albania?
- The list covers 5 places.