Blue Eye (Syri i Kaltër)

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. The result is a pool of almost unreal colour, a dark, inky blue at the centre, where the shaft plunges away, fading to turquoise and then to a pale jade over the gravel at the edges.

The flow is huge for a single spring, of the order of eighteen cubic metres every second, and it pours straight away as the Bistricë, a river that runs for about 25 km before reaching the Ionian Sea south of Sarandë. The water is cold, clear and fast, and the whole stretch below the pool is lined with the same improbable blue. Around it grows a shady forest of oak and sycamore, which frames the spring and keeps the light soft, and the best view is from the edge of the pool, looking straight down into the shaft.

Albania protected the spring and its surroundings as a natural monument in 1996, and the protected area now covers about 180 hectares, managed by the national environment authorities. The source is not inexhaustible: in the dry summer of 2004 it stopped flowing for a time, a reminder that it depends on the karst of the mountains around it. The local name is Syri i Kaltër, simply "the blue eye", which describes it better than any comparison could.

The Blue Eye sits in the hills between the coast at Sarandë and the old town of Gjirokastër, and it combines naturally with both. It is a short stop, but one of those where people tend to stay much longer than they planned, simply watching the colour change with the light.

Getting there

The spring is about 17 km from Gjirokastër and about 22 km from Sarandë, reached from the Sarandë–Gjirokastër road via the village of Krongj. The nearest airport is Corfu (CFU) in Greece, about 43 km away across the strait; ferries from Corfu reach Sarandë in about half an hour. Within Albania, the nearest international airport is Tirana (TIA), about 170 km away. Buses run from Sarandë to the Blue Eye in about 30 minutes, and some Sarandë–Gjirokastër buses take the road past it.