Alpet e Shqipërisë

The Albanian Alps — Bjeshkët e Nemuna, the Accursed Mountains — are the southern crescendo of the Dinaric chain, and in January 2022 Albania gathered its share of them into a single national park. The decree merged the two most famous valleys in the country, Theth and Valbona, with the Gashi River reserve and the limestone country between them, and the result is Albania's largest park by a wide margin: a wall of grey karst where Maja e Jezercës, at 2,694 metres the highest summit of the entire Dinaric Alps, stands wholly on Albanian ground. This is young, violent topography — glacial cirques bitten into reef limestone, valleys a thousand metres deep, and rock that holds no water, so that streams vanish and reappear kilometres away.

Theth is the park's western heart: a scatter of stone houses and shingle roofs on a green valley floor, with the Grunas waterfall thundering off the cirque wall and the church spire that appears on half the country's postcards. The village keeps a kulla e ngujimit — a lock-in tower where men marked for blood vengeance under the Kanun once sat out feuds — and an hour downstream the Blue Eye of Theth fills a pothole with improbable turquoise. Over the ridge at Qafa e Valbonës, the 1,795-metre pass, lies Valbona: a broader, barer valley of river gravel and scattered guesthouses under the fangs of Maja e Rosit. The pass walk between the two valleys has become the best-known day hike in the Balkans, and the Peaks of the Balkans circuit continues over the borders into Montenegro and Kosovo.

The eastern arm of the park story belongs to the Gashi River, a roadless basin of old beech forest that was a strict nature reserve before the merger and is one of Albania's two components in UNESCO's serial listing of Europe's primeval beech forests. The wildlife list reads like the continent's lost inventory — brown bear, wolf, chamois, capercaillie, and a rumoured handful of lynx — persisting here because the terrain defeated roads for so long. Remoteness was the region's curse and is now its capital: until the 2000s these valleys were nearly cut off, and the guesthouse economy that has since grown up in Theth and Valbona is the most visible rural revival in Albania.

What's worth knowing before you go

Shkodër is the gateway city. The road to Theth over the Qafa e Tërthores is now fully paved — the drive that was once a legend of misery takes under two hours — while Valbona is usually reached the beautiful way: minibus to Koman, then the two-and-a-half-hour ferry through the fjord-like Drin reservoir to Fierza, then road up the valley. Walk the pass between mid-June and early October; snow closes it otherwise, and the guesthouses mostly shut in winter. Book beds ahead in August — both valleys fill. The connoisseur's move is to sleep in Theth two nights and give the spare day to the Grunas canyon and the Blue Eye rather than rushing the crossing; the ferry, not the trail, is the part people underestimate.