Dhërmi

The road down into Dhërmi from the Llogara Pass is the kind of drive that makes you grip the door handle and then, ten minutes later, forget entirely that you were scared, because the sea has come into view and it is doing something with light that I hadn’t seen the Mediterranean side of Europe do before — bands of teal, then jade, then a deep almost-navy further out, all visible at once from the switchbacks. Dhërmi itself splits into two parts: the old village, stacked stone houses climbing the hillside a couple of kilometers inland with a scatter of Byzantine churches tucked among them, and the beach strip below, which has grown fast in the last decade but still hasn’t lost the plot the way parts of Croatia or southern Italy have.

I stayed five nights at a small family guesthouse above the main beach, run by a woman named Miranda who brought us fig jam and raki unprompted every single morning regardless of how clearly we hadn’t asked for either. The beach itself — smooth pebbles, not sand — runs for a couple of kilometers and is still backed in places by olive terraces rather than concrete, though a few beach clubs have moved in with sunbeds and house music that gets loud by mid-afternoon. I found a quieter cove ten minutes’ walk south past the rocks, empty most mornings, where the water goes from ankle-deep to over my head within about four strides and is clear enough to watch small fish investigate my feet.

In the evenings we’d climb up to the old village for dinner, where a handful of tavernas serve grilled fish and qifqi — Riviera-style rice balls studded with mint, a local specialty I’d never encountered before and have since failed to replicate at home. From up there the whole bay lights up gold at sunset, boats coming in, the Llogara ridge going purple behind everything.

When to go: June or September gives you warm sea and functioning restaurants without the July-August crush, when Tirana and the wider Balkans descend on the Riviera en masse and prices roughly triple.