TIRANA, Feb. 14 – A campsite along the Shkodra Lake, northern Albania, has been rated Albania’s best by a German portal focused on European camping holidays.
The ranking is made by Berlin-based Camping.info, one of the leading information portals for camping holidays in Europe selecting the most popular from over 22,000 campsites in 44 European countries.
Lake Shkodra Resort is an Albanian and English family owned campsite and holiday resort situated directly on the beautiful Lake Shkodra that has been operating for the past six years as a holiday resort with a campsite, also offering canoe and mountain bike, fishing and swimming as well as adventure trips to other northern Albanian mountain sites.
While not making it to Europe’s top 100, the Lake Shkodra resort is rated as one of the top campsites from 10 other countries not represented on the Top 100 list such as Greece and Sweden.
“This annual award is purely a people’s choice award; there is no jury and no discretionary decision-making. Ratings submitted by campers are all that counts,” says Camping.info.
“The rankings are based exclusively on the ratings provided by campers… in which only customer satisfaction counts. This means that even small, highly committed campsites have a good chance of being listed among the Top 100 in Europe and of being discovered as an insider tip,” says Maximilian Moehrle, the managing director of Camping.info as quoted in a statement.
Lake Shkodra resort is situated only 7 km from the city of Shkodra, an ancient city that is the largest in northern Albania, some 24 km from the Montenegrin border.
“Our grounds are 2.5 hectares (over 6 acres) in size and include a private beach with direct access into the lake. Our beach front restaurant and bar specialises in grilled meats & seafood, traditional Albanian cuisine, pizzas and home grown organic vegetables. The resort boasts breathtaking views and is in a peaceful rural location, yet close to Shkoder. We offer excursions to [northern Albania] Thethi, Valbone, Vermosh, Kruja, Lake Koman and Shkoder,” owners say in their portal about the campsite which opens from mid-April to October each year.
Shared by both Albania and Montenegro, Lake Shkodra is the Balkans’ largest with a surface area of 475 km2 and has been included in the list of Ramsar site of wetlands of international importance for its variety of habitats since a decade now.
Lake Shkodra restaurants are famous for cooking the local Carp casserole, drawing local and international tourists, especially at weekends.
Back in 2017, the drastic decline in water levels at the Shkodra Lake in northern Albania following one of the worst droughts in decades brought to light a 19th century Austro-Hungarian steamship which is believed to have sunken in Shiroka, a tourist lake village just outside Shkodra.
With tourism high on the agenda as an emerging sector and efforts to make it a year-round industry Albania has several other campsites including sites along the Albanian Riviera.
Albania has made it to a series of top under-the-radar and affordable destinations for 2019, hinting the country’s emerging and fast growing travel and tourism industry is set for another golden year.
The most important ratings come from prestigious Lonely Planet and booking.com, but also a number of travel writers, recommending Albania as a still off-the-beaten-path and budget destination.
Several outdoor tour operators in the country offer hiking, rafting, biking, horse riding and birds watching adventures in the country, while cross-border tourism is gaining an upper hand with the opening of several mountain hiking trails.
The communist past is also what fascinates tourists about Albania, which was cut off from the rest of the world under a hardline Stalinist dictatorship.
