The Albanian Riviera: The Most Beautiful Beaches from Vlora to Saranda

The first time I drove the road out of Vlora, I didn't know enough to be nervous about it. The tarmac climbs almost immediately, the pine forest closes in on both sides, and then, right around the top of the Llogara Pass, over a thousand meters up, the trees just stop and the entire Ionian Sea shows up underneath you at once. I actually pulled over, which I don't usually do for a view, and sat there for a while doing nothing except looking at it. A friend later told me Top Gear did the same road for an episode years back and more or less had the same reaction on camera, which made me feel slightly less dramatic about it.

What nobody tells you before that drive is that the pass isn't the destination, it's the opening scene. What follows is close to two hours of coastline where every single bay looks and feels like a different place entirely — not a repeating loop of "nice Mediterranean beach" but a genuinely different mood every ten or fifteen minutes. So instead of ranking them, which feels a bit beside the point, here's the drive itself, roughly in the order you'll actually hit it.

Coming from Vlora, the Llogara Pass is unavoidable and, honestly, is worth the trip on its own even before you've seen a single beach. It used to be a single rough lane full of potholes before it was rebuilt into the smooth two-lane road it is now, cutting through the Cika mountain range with olive and citrus groves giving way to bare, dramatic peaks. There's a small tourist village near the top where you can stop for a coffee at altitude and look down at Dhërmi as a smudge of white far below. Take the hairpins slowly — not because they're dangerous if you're paying attention, but because looking away from the sea view for too long feels like a genuine waste.

Dhërmi is where most people's Riviera photos come from, and it earns that reputation honestly: a long stretch of pale pebbles against water so clear it looks color-corrected, even in real life. There's a proper hillside village above the beach, all stone houses and small Orthodox churches, that almost nobody bothers to walk up to because the shoreline itself is so demanding of attention — beach clubs, music drifting from more than one direction in summer, a genuine party energy that ramps up hard in June and July. I like Dhërmi best either very early in the morning, before the clubs have their speakers on, or completely out of season, when the village above finally gets the attention it deserves.

Gjipe is the one I send people to when they tell me they want to feel like they found something themselves. There's no road in — you either hike down through a genuinely dramatic 70-meter canyon or arrive by boat from Himarë, and either way you show up a little sweaty and a little smug about it. There's no electricity, no running water, nothing built beyond a couple of simple beach bars in peak season. If you get there before 9am, which I've done exactly once and regretted not doing more often, you get the cove essentially to yourself, with visibility in the water good enough that snorkeling feels like cheating. It's not a beach you stumble into by accident, and that's precisely the point of it.

Jalë sits close enough to Dhërmi that people sometimes lump the two together, but it has its own thing going on — a mix of backpacker energy and beach-bar buzz split across a few distinct little zones along the bay, so you can drift from a livelier stretch to a quieter one without going far. The bay's currents do something to the water clarity here that I still can't fully explain, but it's some of the most transparent water on the whole coast. It's gotten pricier and busier over the last few seasons as word has spread, which is the honest trade-off of a place this good-looking.

The One That Actually Has Sand

Most of the Riviera is a pebble coast, which surprises first-time visitors expecting soft Albanian sand to match the postcards. Himarë town beach is one of the exceptions — genuinely soft, pale sand that wouldn't look out of place on a Greek island a few kilometers across the water. It's also a real functioning town rather than a beach-club strip, with ATMs, pharmacies, and small restaurants doing a very good, very Greek-influenced take on grilled fish, plus a sixth-century Justinian-era castle sitting above the water keeping an eye on things. If you want a beach day that comes with an actual town attached, this is the stop.

Porto Palermo is the one that makes visitors stop mid-sentence the first time they round the bend and see it: a pentagon-shaped Ottoman fortress sitting right at the edge of a sheltered bay, close enough to the swimmers that it feels less like a monument and more like a very serious lifeguard station. I can't think of anywhere else on this stretch of the Mediterranean where you swim in genuinely calm, protected water with a centuries-old fortress this close, and local fishermen usually have the morning's catch set up nearby if you time it right for lunch.

Qeparo doesn't show up in nearly as many feeds as Dhërmi or Ksamil, and I've never fully understood why, because the beach here does something genuinely strange and wonderful: a row of Cold War-era concrete bunkers, the same blocky ones scattered across the whole country, repainted in bright pink, yellow, and blue, sitting right along the shoreline against water that's a deep, saturated blue of its own. The old village up the hill is close to a time capsule, quiet stone lanes that have mostly resisted the development further down the coast. It's the stop I make when I want a beach afternoon that also feels like a small adventure into somewhere half-forgotten.

Borsh is the longest unbroken beach in Albania, seven kilometers of pale pebbles running beneath olive groves and the odd scattered ruin up in the hills, and it stays remarkably undeveloped even at the height of summer. There's plenty of coastline here to simply disappear into for an afternoon without another towel in sight, which is a genuinely rare thing to say about anywhere on this coast by August. If Dhërmi is the Riviera showing off, Borsh is the Riviera when nobody's watching, and I mean that as the highest compliment I can give a beach.

Eventually the road brings you to Ksamil, and I have to be honest about this one because it's the single place on this list I get the most conflicted questions about. The three small islands just offshore, reachable by a short swim or an even shorter boat ride, are genuinely as beautiful as every photo you've seen, and it's one of the only spots on the whole Riviera with proper soft sand. It's also, by a wide margin, the most developed and crowded stretch of coast in the country — sunbeds packed edge to edge in August, a steady churn of boat traffic through water that would otherwise be flawlessly clear. I still recommend it, but I recommend it in June or September, when the water and the islands are exactly as good and the crowd is a fraction of what it becomes at the height of summer.

If You're Doing This Drive Yourself

The whole stretch from Vlora down to Sarandë is entirely doable as a single long day if you're determined, but it deserves at least two or three, because every bay genuinely rewards slowing down rather than ticking it off. A rental car gives you the freedom to pull over wherever the light looks good, which on this road happens more often than you'd think; furgons run the route too and stop near most of the main beaches, just on a looser schedule than you might be used to. Whichever way you do it, my honest advice is to let the drive itself be part of the plan rather than a means of getting between beaches — on the SH8, the road is doing at least as much work as any single stop along it.

Which Albanian Riviera beach is best for families? Himarë town beach is my usual recommendation — real sand, calm water, and an actual town nearby with pharmacies and easy food options, rather than a remote cove with nothing built around it.

Which beach is best if I want to avoid crowds? Borsh and Gjipe, for different reasons — Borsh because there's simply so much coastline to spread out along, and Gjipe because the hike in naturally filters out anyone not willing to make the walk.

Is Ksamil worth visiting despite the crowds? Yes, especially outside peak August — the islands and water really are as striking as the photos suggest, and in June or September the crowds thin out enough to actually enjoy it.

Do I need a car to see the Albanian Riviera properly? It helps enormously, mainly because it lets you stop wherever you want on the Llogara Pass and between towns, but furgons do connect the main beach towns if you'd rather not drive.

Are the Albanian Riviera beaches sandy or pebbly? Mostly pebble, which surprises a lot of first-time visitors — Himarë town beach and parts of Ksamil are the main exceptions with genuine soft sand.

If you only have time for one stretch of this coast, I still think the drive itself, Llogara Pass down through Dhërmi and on to Himarë, gives you the fullest sense of what the Riviera actually is. But the real answer, the one I give my own friends, is to not pick just one — this is a coastline built for stopping constantly, pulling over at whatever catches your eye, and letting the two-hour drive quietly turn into a two-day one.