Old Towns, a Castle Road & the Ionian Coast

Direct SAS flight CPH → TIA (~2h35m). Land midday, taxi or Airport Shuttle into the centre (~30–40 min), check into the hotel in Blloku.

Walk Skanderbeg Square — at 40,000m² the largest pedestrianised space in the Balkans — then the gold-and-red Et'hem Bey Mosque and the 1822 Clock Tower right beside it.

Settle in over dinner in Blloku, the former Communist-elite quarter turned café-and-bar district.

Bunk'Art 2, a compact underground museum in Enver Hoxha's former bunker steps from Skanderbeg Square, covers the Sigurimi secret police and 45 years of surveillance — 60–90 minutes, unsettling and essential. Follow with the National History Museum next door for the wider sweep of Albanian history.

Pick up the hire car and drive south to Berat, Albania's "town of a thousand windows" — a UNESCO site of stacked white Ottoman houses climbing to a still-inhabited hilltop castle. Check into the Mangalem quarter and walk up as the light goes golden.

Dinner on a terrace looking straight across the river gorge at the illuminated Mangalem houses.

Climb Berat Castle — still a living neighbourhood inside its walls — for the Onufri Museum's 16th-century Byzantine icons, then cross the Ottoman-era Gorica Bridge over the Osum.

Drive south to Gjirokastër via Tepelenë. Check into the old bazaar quarter, then climb to the Gjirokastër Fortress — the vast Ottoman citadel that gives the "stone city" its silhouette, with a captured US Air Force jet and a Cold War tunnel museum inside.

Dinner in the old bazaar over Gjirokastër's signature dish.

Walk the Ethnographic Museum, built on the site of dictator Enver Hoxha's birth house, then the Zekate House, the finest of the old town's fortified Ottoman merchant mansions with its painted double-height reception room.

Drive south, stopping at the Blue Eye Spring (Syri i Kaltër) near Muzinë — a karst pool so deep and cold the centre reads as an almost unreal cobalt blue. A short boardwalk loop, 30–45 minutes, no need to swim (it's genuinely icy). Continue on to Ksamil.

Check into your beach base and walk the shoreline as the light drops over Corfu on the horizon.

Butrint National Park, Albania's first UNESCO World Heritage Site — 3,000 years of Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian and Ottoman layers in one wooded peninsula: the 3rd-century-BC theatre, the paleo-Christian baptistery with its mosaic floor, and the acropolis. Give it 2–3 unhurried hours.

Back to Ksamil for its four small islands — a short paddleboat or water-taxi ride out to genuinely turquoise water and near-empty sandbars if you go before 11am or after 4pm.

Dinner on the Ksamil waterfront.

Slow morning on the Sarandë promenade, then up to Lëkurësi Castle on the hill above town for the best panorama on this stretch of coast — the whole bay, and Corfu clearly visible across the strait.

Short drive up the coast toward Himarë for a swim at one of the Riviera's clearer pebble beaches, or stay local and browse Sarandë's old quarter and market.

This week's standout dinner: sunset over the Ionian from "the Balcony of Sarandë."

Drive north on the SH8 coast road through Himarë and Dhërmi, then climb Llogara Pass — hairpins above pine forest with the whole Riviera laid out below; the new Llogara Tunnel means you can bypass the old high road on a bad-weather day, but drive the pass itself if conditions allow, it's the scenic reason to do this leg by car.

Down to Vlorë: the pastel-fronted old town square, the 1537 Muradie Mosque, and the Independence Museum — the pale-yellow building where Albania's 1912 declaration of independence was signed. Then the drive on to Tirana.

Drop the hire car in Tirana. Farewell dinner back in Blloku.

Check out, last byrek and coffee, taxi to Tirana Airport.

Direct SAS flight TIA → CPH, ~2h35m — home by evening.