Llogara Pass

I’ve driven a lot of mountain passes and Llogara still made my knuckles go white, not from danger exactly — the road is well-paved and well-signed — but from sheer vertical drama. You climb out of the Vlorë plain through black pine forest, the temperature actually dropping a few degrees as you gain altitude, and then somewhere past 1,000 meters the trees thin and the whole Ionian coast appears below you at once, the Riviera towns reduced to pale smudges against water so far down it looks like you could drop a stone into Greece.

We stopped at Llogara National Park, which straddles the summit, and walked twenty minutes off the road into black pine forest that smelled sharply resinous in the midday heat, cooler under the canopy than the coast we’d left an hour before. There’s a scrappy handful of roadside grills at the pass itself, wooden shacks with plastic tables, serving grilled lamb and byrek to truck drivers and paragliders in roughly equal number — this is apparently one of Albania’s serious paragliding launch points, and I watched two colorful wings lift off the ridge and drift out over the sea while I ate.

The descent toward Dhërmi afterward is its own event — the road drops almost 1,000 meters in a series of switchbacks tight enough that I lost count somewhere in the twenties, each turn opening a slightly different angle on the coast until you’re finally down at sea level wondering how you got there so fast.

When to go: Spring and early summer bring wildflowers and clear air on the pass; go early morning if you want the coastal view without the haze that tends to build up by afternoon.