After 40 years of travel to Albania, has it finally come of age as a tourist destination?

Having visited the region since the 1970s, Simon Calder finds that hard-line extreme communism and rigorous border checks are now making way for a warm overseas welcome – with a little help from Ryanair

Move aside Greece: lower prices await across the border, including in the port of Saranda (above) (Getty/iStock)

The first-ever long weekend holiday to Albania ended badly. We 20 or so pioneers had paid (I recall) £295 for a package that included flights from Heathrow via Zagreb to Titograd – now Podgorica, in independent Montenegro. A coach took us up a very long and winding road to the Albanian border. We walked across the frontier into a dingy border processing office. None of the men was selected for an obligatory shave or haircut: we had been warned that was a possibility for hirsute males.

Our baggage was enthusiastically rummaged, with printed matter closely inspected. As we discovered, though, the checks were not rigorous enough. After four days of wonders – the natural beauty of the mountains that dominate the nation, the implausibly preserved medieval towns with silent streets – the guides revealed a holiday scandal.

A family of four on the trip had been clear outliers from the start. The rest of us were adult adventurers, some of whom were ticking off a visit to Europe’s hermit republic. They had kept themselves to themselves – or so we thought.