Butrint

Butrint is the rarest kind of national park: one wrapped around a whole ancient city. Buthrotum sat on a low peninsula where the Vivari Channel lets the Ionian into Lake Butrint, and nearly every age of the Mediterranean built here in turn — a Chaonian hilltop town, a Hellenistic sanctuary of Asclepius with its theatre, a Roman colony with forum and bathhouses, a Byzantine bishopric, a Venetian trading post, and finally the fortress Ali Pasha of Tepelena raised at the channel mouth to watch for the French on Corfu. When the city finally emptied in the late Middle Ages the forest took it, and that is Butrint's magic now: black glossy laurel and holm oak growing through Roman brick, eucalyptus alleys planted by the Italian excavators of the 1930s, and the theatre's stone seats sitting in water half the year because the land has subsided since antiquity.

The park's masterpiece is the early Christian baptistery, a sixth-century rotunda whose floor is one of the finest mosaic pavements of the late antique world — peacocks, vines and two hundred medallions of animals. It spends most of its life buried under protective sand and is uncovered only rarely, which visitors should know before they come; the deal is honest, since exposure would destroy it. What is always open compensates: the Lion Gate in the cyclopean walls, the great basilica open to the sky, and the view from the acropolis museum across the lagoon to the Straits of Corfu — one of the classic prospects of the Ionian.

The living park matters as much as the dead city. Lake Butrint is a deep brackish lagoon, its still lower layers oxygen-free, its shallows strung with the mussel lines that have been worked here since the 1960s; the channel and marshes hold herons, kingfishers and wintering wildfowl, and the wooded Mile hills close the site off from the coastal strip. That closeness to development is the park's live issue — a 2022 boundary revision stripped some eight hundred coastal hectares from protection near booming Ksamil, a decision conservation bodies contested — and it makes the intact core feel all the more deliberate.

What's worth knowing before you go

Saranda is the practical base, Ksamil the nearer one; city buses run the half hour to the gate, and Corfu day-trippers arrive by hydrofoil late morning — be at the gate at opening and you will have the theatre nearly alone. Allow a half day: the ruins circuit, the museum on the acropolis, and the cable ferry across the Vivari Channel to Ali Pasha's triangular castle. Spring is the season of seasons, with the marsh birds in voice and the laurel fresh. The connoisseur's detail is to cross the channel and walk the southern shore path towards the fish weirs at dusk, when the site closes, the water stills, and Butrint goes back to being what it has been for two and a half thousand years — a city between two waters.