Ten days in Albania: bunkers in the capital, and a coast Greece would charge triple for

Start in the middle. Skanderbeg Square was a roundabout until 2017 and is now a vast paved plaza laid with stone from every region of the country. The statue is the fifteenth century warlord who held the Ottomans off for a quarter of a century and remains the national hero by a distance; behind him stand the ochre ministries the Italians put up in the 1930s.

On the northeast corner is the oldest building in the centre. The mosque was finished in 1821 after nearly thirty years of work, closed in 1967 when Albania abolished religion outright and declared itself an atheist state, and reopened in 1991 when ten thousand people walked in without waiting for permission. The frescoes inside are painted with trees, waterfalls and bridges, which is close to unique in an Ottoman mosque.

Beside it stands the clock tower of the 1820s, thirty five metres up a spiral stair, with a view over a square and a skyline that is being rebuilt as you look at it.

Then walk south into Blloku. Until 1991 these four streets were sealed and guarded so that Enver Hoxha and the leadership could live undisturbed; his villa is still there, closed and unremarkable, and everything around it is bars and kitchens. Eat there.

This is the day that explains the country, and it is best taken in one run.

The House of Leaves is a 1930s villa a minute from the square that opened as Albania's first maternity hospital and was converted within a few years into the headquarters of the secret police's surveillance division. It is now a museum, largely as it was found: bugging equipment, microphones sewn into furniture, files, photographs of informers, and numbers that are hard to take in, because in a country of under three million the Sigurimi ran an informer for something like every dozen adults.

In the afternoon go east to the bunker. Hoxha had a five storey shelter dug into a hillside for himself and the leadership, over a hundred rooms of it, sealed behind blast doors and never used. It opened as a museum in 2014 and you walk in through the tunnel and out through his private suite, past rooms on the Italian occupation, the partisans and the paranoid decades that followed.

The cable car station is a short hop from the bunker, so finish on the mountain. Fifteen minutes of Austrian engineering lifts you out of the heat to a pine plateau near the top of Dajti, with a long view over the plain to the sea and a row of restaurants doing spit-roast lamb. It is ten degrees cooler up there and the sunset is the best hour in Tirana.

Walk down the Italian boulevard to the pyramid. It went up in 1987 as a museum to Enver Hoxha, designed by his daughter and her husband, and it is the strangest building in the Balkans: a low concrete star that children slid down through the 1990s while the country argued about demolishing it. In 2023 it reopened, with staircases built up the outside and studios inside, as a technology centre for young people. Climb it.

Back at the square, the national museum sits behind a socialist realist mosaic of Albanians marching forward through history with rifles. Inside, the collection runs from Illyrian bronzes and Roman mosaics through the Middle Ages to a hall on the communist period and the persecution of the churches. The lighting is poor and the labelling patchy, and it is still the best single account of the country you will find.

In the afternoon, the second bunker, dug under the ministry on the square itself, and given over to the police, the internal exile system and the camps. It is sharper and shorter than the big one and the two do not repeat each other.

Then a last long dinner, because tomorrow you are on a bus.

Buses to Berat leave through the morning from the southern terminal and take about two and a half hours across the plain and then up the Osum valley.

Drop the bag and look up. Mangalem is one steep face of whitewashed Ottoman houses with dark timber window bays, packed so tightly that the lanes between them turn into staircases. It was the Muslim quarter and three of the town's old mosques still stand in it.

The prettiest of them is at the bottom of the slope: a small mosque of 1827 built for the unmarried craftsmen and shop boys of the bazaar, who were not permitted to pray alongside married men, with painted panels of houses and trees on the outside walls.

In the late afternoon cross the eighteenth century stone bridge into Gorica, the Christian quarter, which is lower, greener and quieter, with orchards behind the houses. Walk east along the bank until the town is behind you and then turn round. Mangalem is lit gold, the castle sits above it, and that is the photograph everybody comes for.

Go up early, before the stone starts holding heat. The road climbs from the top of Mangalem in about twenty minutes over cobbles laid for hooves; a taxi does it for a couple of euros.

What is inside the walls is not a monument. The fortifications are largely thirteenth century on foundations going back to the fourth century BC, and they enclose several hectares of hilltop that has never stopped being lived in: lanes, gardens, chickens, guesthouses, two restaurants and about a hundred households, with the ruins and remains of more than a dozen Byzantine churches scattered among them. You will walk into somebody's courtyard by mistake and nobody will mind.

The best church is the biggest, built in 1797 over tenth century foundations, and it holds the icon museum. Onufri was a sixteenth century painter and archpriest famous for a red he mixed himself and which nobody has reproduced since. The paintings hang with the gilded screen still in place, in a cool dim room that is almost always empty.

Come down in the afternoon for the ethnographic museum, an Ottoman merchant's house on the castle road kept as a museum of local life: a stone ground floor for stores, a wooden floor above it for living, carved ceilings, cupboards hidden in the panelling, and the deep window bays that give this town its nickname.

This is the long leg, about four hours south, usually with a change and always worth checking the evening before. The road runs down the Vjosa valley, which is the last big river in Europe with no dam anywhere along it and became a national park in 2023.

Gjirokaster arrives grey. The houses are built of the local stone and roofed with slabs of it, tier on tier up a steep ridge, and after rain the whole town glitters. They are defensive buildings: tall, slit-windowed at the bottom, with one good room at the top and a view of the approaches, because families in this region feuded and the architecture says so.

Start in the bazaar, the crossing point of the old town since the seventeenth century, rebuilt after a fire in 1893 exactly as it had been. The mosque where the streets meet dates from 1757 and survived the abolition of religion in 1967 because it was handed over as a training hall for circus acrobats; it is the only one of the town's dozen mosques left.

Then a tower house. The Skenduli house is eighteenth century, still owned by the family whose name it carries, and the owner shows you round: stone below for animals and stores, a floor for winter and a floor for summer, chimneys everywhere, carved ceilings and cupboards you would not find on your own.

Eat qifqi, which are balls of rice and mint fried in a dimpled pan and made in this town and nowhere else.

Go up early. The fortress covers the whole crest of the ridge and most of what you walk through is the work of Ali Pasha of Tepelena, who rebuilt it around 1812 while running southern Albania and much of northern Greece more or less as his own country.

The long vaulted gallery holds captured artillery, some of it Italian and German from the Second World War, and a good deal of unease: this was a prison under the monarchy, the Italians, the Germans and then Hoxha's government, and the cells are still here. Out on the ramparts sits a small American training jet. The official story for forty years was that it was shot down as a spy plane in 1957; what happened was that it developed a fault, was allowed to land, and never left.

In the afternoon, the grandest of the tower houses. Zekate was built in 1811 or 1812 by a treasurer of Ali Pasha: two towers, three floors, an arched double stair and a first-floor reception room with a carved and painted ceiling that took a year of somebody's life. You collect the key from the family living below.

Then the ethnographic museum, on the site of the house where Enver Hoxha was born, furnished as a wealthy nineteenth century household. The original burned in 1916 and what stands is a reconstruction, and the town has never quite settled on how to describe whose house it was.

The last leg is the shortest, an hour and a quarter through a pass and down to the coast, and it is worth breaking. About half way, a short detour from the road leads to a karst spring where water comes up out of a hole in the ground so deep that nobody has reached the bottom of it, in a colour somewhere between sapphire and ink. It is called the Blue Eye, it is freezing, and people swim in it anyway.

Saranda itself is a wall of concrete around a horseshoe bay, built fast and without much thought, with a promenade, a great many fish restaurants and Corfu on the horizon. Nobody comes for the town.

Spend the afternoon twenty minutes south instead. Ksamil is a village with a run of small beaches and four little islands just offshore, close enough to swim to, in water that is genuinely turquoise. It has been built on hard in the last decade and some of it is a mess, and the water is still some of the clearest in the Mediterranean.

Fish for dinner back in Saranda, on the promenade, with the lights of another country across the strait.

Twenty minutes south of Saranda, on a wooded peninsula between a lagoon and the sea, is one of the most complete ancient sites in the Mediterranean and one of the least visited.

Butrint was a Greek colony, then a Roman one, then a bishopric, then a Byzantine town, then Venetian, and it was finally abandoned to the marsh and the malaria in the Middle Ages, which is why it survived. The circuit takes a couple of hours on a path through holm oak and laurel: a theatre of the third century BC with its seats intact, a Roman forum, a baptistery with a mosaic floor of birds and beasts that is kept under sand and uncovered only rarely, a basilica, and Venetian walls at the top of the hill with a view over the whole lagoon.

Go early. There is no shade on the upper part of the site, the tour boats from Corfu arrive mid morning, and the light on the water is better before ten.

In the afternoon, back in Saranda, the excavated remains of a fifth century synagogue sit in the middle of the modern town, with mosaic floors showing a menorah, and they take fifteen minutes. Then swim off the town beach, or take a boat, and eat late.

Saranda's own museum is small and better than the town deserves: a Roman mosaic floor kept where it was found, plus Illyrian, Greek and Roman material from the area around, including a good deal from the site you walked yesterday. Half an hour, and it puts the ruins in order.

Then a last swim and a coffee on the promenade, which is where the whole town walks in the evening and a good part of it walks in the morning too.

From here you have three ways out. The ferry to Corfu takes forty minutes and lands you at a major airport. The bus north up the Riviera reaches Vlore in four hours and Tirana in seven. Or you can turn inland for Greece, half an hour away over the pass.