TIRANA, Jan. 11 – Still undiscovered and little known by most European tourists, Albania has been placed as a 2018 under-the-radar destination by prestigious travel media and tour operators.
The National Geographic has rated Albania among the 2018 places one needs to visit, especially for adventurer and divers.
“Sunken aqueducts, shipwrecks, and rarely visited caves are a few of the relatively untouched treasures awaiting divers in Albania. Decades of isolation under communist leader Enver Hoxha limited development and inadvertently preserved underwater cultural heritage, particularly off the southern coast,” says the National Geographic, pointing out the Fun Fact of late dictator Enver Hoxha famously banning scuba diving to prevent Albanias from escaping the hardline communist regime.
Albania’s ranking comes amid popular destinations such as Argentina, Australia, Mexico, Austria, Hawaii, Sweden and Ireland.
In late 2017, the National Geographic France rated taking an adventure trip to Albania as one of the top tours on travelers’ to-do-list for 2018.
National Geographic’s French publication recommends Albania for its ancient history, unexplored landscape, making it a perfect adventure travel destination.
“Under communist dictatorship for decades, Albania is slowly opening up. Discover its Ottoman cities of Berat and Gjirokastra, the Greco-Roman amphitheaters, the beaches and above all the country’s unexplored landscapes such as alpine summits, green valleys, wetlands and rich fauna,” writes the National Geographic.
Explaining the reasons why this trip should be taken now, the prestigious exploration and adventure magazine says Albania is a perfect adventure travel destination offering trekking, horseback riding, rafting and kayaking.
“Albania is recently playing its adventure card. The latest initiative was last May when a hiking trail was launched at the Nature Reserve of the Karaburun peninsula, an ancient military base accessible only on foot or by boat,” says the magazine, adding that crossing the peninsula with a small boat, a small bay perfect for scuba-diving comes across close to a 600 m2 cave.
UK-based Wild Frontiers tour operator has also named Albania among the world’s top three adventure travel destinations for 2018 along with Pakistan and Jordan.
Albania’s rating is part of the Western Balkans tour which the tour operator says is attracting an increasing number of travelers seeking out new off-the-beaten path experiences in Europe.
“Since the tragic war of the late 1990s, the Balkans has been quietly developing into an off-the-beaten track destination for those looking for hidden gems in Europe,” the Adventure Travel News quotes the Wild Frontiers.
The British tour operator suggests walking tours in southern Albania exploring the coast, archaeological sites and national parks as well as northern Albanian mountains, remote villages and forests.
“Extending across vistas liberally scattered with deep river valleys, alpine lakes and national parks, the towering limestone gorges of the Accursed Mountains, or Albanian Alps, provide the perfect backdrop to one of Europe’s last great adventures,” Wild Frontiers says about the northern Albania tour.
“Albania is also blessed with some of the Adriatic’s wildest landscapes as well as possibly the continent’s least developed tourism infrastructure, not to mention some captivating history. If that thought fills you with excitement then join us for this wonderful adventure into the wilds of the mountainous hinterlands of the south through which Byron once walked,” the tour operator says about southern Albania.
The Irish Times has rated Albania as top two budget destination for 2018, sandwiched between the Spanish Costas and Turkey.
“Not the first place a family might think of, nor the easiest to get to – you’d have to travel via Manchester – but it has novelty factor and is much cheaper than Italy or Croatia. The beaches are beautiful, the villages quaint – look towards the medieval town of Kruja, Apollonia’s ruins and Berat, the Unesco World Heritage site famous(ish) for Byzantine churches and Ottoman architecture. Car hire is less than €10 a day and restaurants and accommodation are as cheap. And the sun will shine,” says the Irish Times.
Closed to tourists for about five decades until the early 1990s, Albania offers a miscellaneous picture of coastal and mountain tourism and has been attracting more and more foreign tourists in the past decade being nicknamed a “A new Mediterranean love” and “Europe’s last secret.”
The communist past is also what fascinates tourists about Albania, which was cut off from the rest of the world under a Stalinist dictatorship for about five decades until the early 1990s.
The House of Leaves museum of the notorious Sigurimi police surveillance in downtown Tirana, a Cold War bunker outside the capital city that the former communist regime had built underground decades ago to survive a possible nuclear attack and the Sazan Island military base south of the country all house the mystery and phobia of the country’s communist leaders for about five decades until the early 1990s.
The tourism industry has been one of the country’s fastest growing in the past few years, attracting more than 4 million tourists and generating about €1.5 billion, about 14 percent of the country’s GDP, in 2016 alone.
