Three days in Gjirokaster: a town of stone that produced a dictator and a novelist

Start in the bazaar, which is the crossing point of the old town and has been the commercial centre since the seventeenth century. It burned down in 1893 and was rebuilt as it had been: two-storey stone buildings with wooden shopfronts, arranged along a spine of cobbled street. The shops now sell carpets, carved wood and a lot of things aimed at visitors, but the street itself is genuine and the light on the stone in the afternoon is remarkable.

The mosque stands where the bazaar streets meet and dates from 1757. In 1967 Albania abolished religion altogether, made itself constitutionally atheist and demolished or converted more than two thousand places of worship; this one survived because it was handed over as a training hall for circus acrobats. It went back to being a mosque in 1991 and it is the only one left of the dozen or so the town once had.

Then visit one of the tower houses. The Skenduli house is eighteenth century, still owned by the family whose name it carries, and the owner shows you round himself: a stone ground floor for stores and animals, then a floor for winter and a floor for summer, chimneys everywhere, carved ceilings, cupboards concealed in the panelling, and a room where guests were received and watched.

Finish at the small Orthodox church nearby, eighteenth century and usually open, then eat qifqi somewhere with a view down the valley.

Go up early. The fortress covers the whole crest of the ridge and is usually described as the largest fortress in the country, and though the site is old, most of what you walk through is the work of Ali Pasha of Tepelena, who rebuilt it around 1812 while running southern Albania and a good deal of Greece more or less as his own country.

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

The clock tower and the western walls give you the whole valley, the ridge of the mountains opposite and the stone roofs falling away below.

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

Then the ethnographic museum, which occupies the site of the house where Enver Hoxha was born and is furnished as a wealthy Gjirokaster household of the nineteenth century. The building burned in 1916 and what stands is a reconstruction, and the town has never entirely settled on how to talk about whose house it was.

Drive east into the Vjosa valley. About forty five minutes away, near the village of Benje, a tall single-arched Ottoman bridge crosses green water where a canyon opens out, and hot springs come out of the ground beside it into a series of stone pools.

The water is around thirty degrees, sulphurous, and locals have been coming here for generations for rheumatism and skin complaints; the medical claims are folklore and the soak is real. Get in, sit in the hot pool until you cannot stand it, then get into the cold river next to it, which is the entire ritual. Go early, because by mid morning in summer there are a great many people doing the same thing.

The gorge upstream is five kilometres of narrow limestone that can be kayaked in spring and waded a short way in summer, and the bridge above the pools is one of the best surviving Ottoman bridges in the country.

From here the road runs on east to Permet and Korce, or you turn back for Gjirokaster and the bus. Either way, the Vjosa below you is the last big wild river in Europe with no dam on it anywhere along its length, which became a national park in 2023.