Two Weeks in Albania: A Relaxed 14-Day Itinerary for the Whole Country

Two weeks in Albania covers the whole country properly: the Accursed Mountains and the Theth–Valbona pass crossing, all four cities worth sleeping in, both UNESCO towns, the quiet Albanian shore of Lake Ohrid, and nearly three days on the Riviera at the end so you fly home rested instead of needing a second holiday.

It is not a rushed sampler. Total driving across the fortnight is around 26 hours, and no single day exceeds three and a half. The route runs north first while your legs are fresh, loops through the interior, and saves the coast for last — which is the correct order for both the weather and your morale.

This builds on our 10-day itinerary and slows it down. The extra four days go to the places one-week visitors always tell us afterwards they regret skipping: a real day in Shkodra rather than a lunch stop, the Korça and Ohrid southeast that almost every itinerary omits, and a second and third beach day where nothing is planned at all.

Comparing trip lengths? Start with our 7, 10 and 14-day overview →

The two weeks at a glance

North first, then a clockwise loop: mountains, cities and lakes in the middle, coast at the end.

Days 1–2: Tirana, Kruja and Shkodra

Ease in. Tirana's centre in the morning — Skanderbeg Square, the National History Museum, Bunk'Art for the context that makes the rest of the fortnight legible — then an afternoon up at Kruja, forty minutes north. Skanderbeg's castle sits on a ridge with the plain falling away beneath it, and the old bazaar below has been selling carpets, copper and silver on the same cobbles since the Ottomans. It is touristy and it is still good.

Day two takes the best road in the country north to Shkodra in ninety minutes, and gives the city the full day that one-week visitors cannot spare. The Marubi National Museum of Photography is the highlight and genuinely world-class: a dynasty of photographers documenting Albania from the 1850s onwards, including the only photographs of a country almost nobody was allowed to see. Bicycles and café streets after lunch, then Rozafa Castle for sunset over the confluence of three rivers and Lake Shkodra.

Days 3–6: the Accursed Mountains, done properly

The drive up to Theth takes about two and a half hours from Shkodra on a road that was surfaced only a few years ago — steep, narrow and entirely manageable in a normal car in dry weather, though it demands your attention.

Two full nights in Theth is the point. It means you can walk to the Grunas waterfall and the Blue Eye of Theth without watching the clock, sit in the meadow below the lock-in tower in the evening, and let the altitude and the quiet do their work. The valley is a scattering of stone houses under 2,000-metre walls, and it empties completely once the day-trippers leave around four.

Then the day that headlines the trip: the Theth–Valbona crossing. Roughly 17 kilometres and a thousand metres of climbing over the pass between two national parks, with a coffee hut near the top run by a family who carry the supplies up themselves, and long views in both directions. Six to eight hours at a friendly pace. Luggage goes around by road, so you carry a daypack.

Day six descends the Valbona valley and catches the Komani Lake ferry — around three hours through a flooded canyon of grey cliffs and scrub that genuinely resembles a Norwegian fjord — back toward the road south.

See the guided Theth & Valbona trek →

Days 7–9: Berat, Korça and Lake Ohrid

Berat gets its full day rather than the half it gets on shorter routes: the lived-in castle quarter where families still occupy houses inside Byzantine walls, the Onufri icon museum in the cathedral at the top, the Gorica bridge at golden hour, and a winery in the evening — the Pulës grape grows nowhere else on earth and the local producers are happy to prove it.

Then the route most itineraries skip entirely. Three hours east to Korça, the 'city of serenades', with a handsome reconstructed bazaar, a genuinely world-class collection of medieval icons in the National Museum of Medieval Art, the first Albanian-language school as a museum, and its own beer that Albanians are sentimental about. It feels more central European than anywhere else in the country.

Day nine is Lake Ohrid's Albanian shore — one of the oldest lakes on earth, around three million years old, with endemic fish found nowhere else. The stone fishing village of Lin sits on a little peninsula with an early Christian basilica and mosaics on the hill above it, and Pogradec does lake trout for lunch. You will have the shoreline largely to yourself; the crowds are all on the North Macedonian side.

Days 10–11: the stone city and the southern classics

Cross the mountains southwest to Gjirokastër — three and a half hours, the longest drive of the fortnight, and a genuinely beautiful one through the Devoll and Drino valleys. Gjirokastër is slate and whitewash climbing a mountainside under one of the largest castles in the Balkans. Walk the vaulted galleries and the battlements, tour the Skenduli House with the family that still owns it, and eat qifqi in the bazaar.

Day eleven runs the southern greatest hits, and runs them early. The Blue Eye spring before nine, before the coaches; Butrint's layered Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Venetian ruins in the late-morning shade of the peninsula; then Ksamil for the afternoon swim.

See the Gjirokastër and Blue Eye day trip →

Days 12–14: the Riviera at last, unhurried

This is the reward for two weeks of castles and passes, and the part of the plan that justifies the fortnight: nearly three days of coast with almost nothing scheduled.

Beach-hop to Gjipe — the canyon mouth you walk twenty-five minutes down to — and Jale, take a boat out of Himarë to the Pirates' Cave and the coves with no road to them, and eat long seafood lunches with the afternoon in front of you. Everyone else on a shorter itinerary is checking out and driving to the airport; you are ordering another coffee. Guests tell us this is the bit they remember.

The last day crosses the Llogara Pass with the whole Riviera unrolling behind you, stops for a farewell seafood lunch in Vlora where the Adriatic meets the Ionian, and rolls into Tirana by early evening.

What two weeks costs

For two people sharing, outside peak August. Two weeks here still costs less than a week in most of the Mediterranean, and the mountain half is cheaper than the coastal half by a clear margin.

The practical part

Driving totals about 26 hours across fourteen days, never more than three and a half in any one. A compact car covers everything on this route in dry summer conditions, including the Theth road and the Korça passes; take more ground clearance if you plan to explore side tracks or if you are travelling at the shoulders of the season.

The logistical wrinkle is the Alps block. You drive to Theth, walk to Valbona, and your car is on the wrong side of a mountain. The standard solution is the loop this itinerary uses — Valbona down to Fierzë, the ferry to Koman, and a transfer back to your vehicle — and it needs arranging in advance rather than improvising on the day.

• Book Theth, Valbona and the Komani ferry before anything else in high summer.
• Carry cash into the mountains. There is no ATM in Theth and card acceptance is patchy in Valbona.
• Pack for two climates. It can be 32°C in Ksamil and 12°C at the Valbona pass in the same week.
• Walking boots for the crossing, not trainers. The descent into Valbona is loose scree in places.
• Leave the last afternoon free. Flights out of Tirana are mostly evening, and the airport road is the one reliable traffic jam on the route.

Doing it without the driving

We build custom two-week trips from these exact blocks — the guided 7-day road trip plus the 3-day Alps trek covers most of the route, and we fill the gaps to fit your dates. That version solves the car-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-mountain problem, the ferry booking and the Theth guesthouse scramble in one go.

It is also the version most couples over about sixty choose, not because the driving is hard but because two weeks of it is tiring in a way that a week is not.

Shorter on time?

The 10-day route covers the Alps and the southern classics without the Korça–Ohrid detour and with one Riviera day instead of three. The 7-day route is the highlights-only version if a week is all you have — both UNESCO towns, the Blue Eye and the coast, no mountains.

See the 10-day Albania itinerary →