Karaburun-Sazan

Karaburun-Sazan is Albania's only marine national park, and it protects the country's emptiest coast: the seaward cliffs of the Karaburun peninsula — the long stone arm that closes the Bay of Vlora — and the waters around Sazan, the island standing in the strait where the Adriatic officially gives way to the Ionian. The park is water: two ribbons of sea a nautical mile wide, hung on a peninsula that has no road, no village and no harbour. The land behind the tide line is a separate managed reserve, which produces the pleasing legal curiosity that on Karaburun you can stand in one protected area and swim in another.

The cliffs run for kilometres in white and ochre bands, broken by caves the sea has bored at the waterline. The greatest, Haxhi Ali, takes an entire excursion boat inside its vaulted chamber and is named for a seventeenth-century corsair-hero of Ulqin who is said to have sheltered here. Further up the coast, Grama Bay is one of the strangest classical sites on the Mediterranean: a quarry cut by Greek and Roman stonemasons whose walls became a visitors' book two millennia deep — hundreds of inscriptions carved by sailors waiting out weather, invoking the Dioscuri or simply recording that they passed. The seabed continues the archive with anchors, amphora fields and wrecks from antiquity to the world wars, which is a large part of why the waters were closed, studied and finally protected in 2010.

Sazan is the park's dark twin. Fortified by Italy between the wars and garrisoned by communist Albania — for a period jointly with Soviet submarines — the island spent the twentieth century as a closed military world of tunnels, barracks and bunkers, and that isolation kept its scrub, its waters and its silence intact. Day visits have been allowed since the mid-2010s, and walking its abandoned garrison streets between agave and rosemary, with the strait glittering on both sides, is one of the most peculiar experiences Albanian nature offers. Dolphins work the strait; the Mediterranean monk seal, the sea's rarest mammal, is recorded along the peninsula's caves.

What's worth knowing before you go

Everything happens by boat from Vlora, Radhima or Orikum — there is no landward access worth attempting. Standard excursions run to Haxhi Ali cave and a swim stop; Sazan requires an operator licensed to land, and Grama Bay a longer, wind-dependent charter down the outer coast, best attempted in settled midsummer weather. The sea state rules all plans — the Otranto strait funnels wind, and trips cancel readily. Snorkelling is superb almost anywhere along the cliffs; diving the wrecks needs a permitted centre. The connoisseur's booking is the dawn departure: the outer coast is glass at first light, the caves hold their colour before the light flattens, and you meet the excursion fleet coming out as you return.