This Europe: Lovers move into dictator's bunkers

For the first-time visitor to Albania, it can be hard to shake off the feeling of being watched. As the only dual carriageway cuts a swath through the dense countryside from the airport into Tirana, it slowly dawns on you that you're surrounded.

Looking down from every hillside, sprouting out of every bank, are the cracked and rusting domes of defence bunkers, the concrete legacy of the paranoid imagination of the Communist leader Enver Hoxha.

More than 700,000 of these cement-and-iron monsters were built between 1950 and the dictator's death in 1985, at two-and-a-half times the cost, and three times the material, invested in France's famously ineffective pre-Second World War Maginot Line.

Built to repel the threat of foreign invasion – a constant fear of one of the world's most isolationist Stalinists – the bunkers are today among the toughest opponents of modernisation in Europe's poorest country.

Since the fall of Communism in 1991, they have abandoned their military duty to become the venue for lovers' trysts and, in the most desperate cases, homes for the thousands of internal refugees.

Precious few have been destroyed, though. When the prototype bunker was finished in the 1950s, Hoxha made the chief engineer stand inside his creation while it was bombarded by a tank. Sadly for the current generation, the shell-shocked engineer emerged unscathed.