The gateway to the Albanian Riviera opens its season, the Ionian turns turquoise, and the South belongs to you!
There is a precise moment in May when Saranda becomes what it will be for the rest of the summer, and that moment is not in July when the ferries from Corfu bring their maximum daily load of visitors, and not in August when the promenade is at full volume and the beach clubs are playing music until four in the morning.
The moment is in May, in the second week of the month, when the last of the spring rains has passed and the temperature reaches twenty-three or twenty-four degrees and the Ionian Sea, which has been warming slowly since March, crosses the threshold of comfort for the kind of swimming that is not an act of courage but an act of pleasure. The restaurants open their terraces fully for the first time. The boat tours put their vessels back in the water. The promenade fills in the evenings with the xhiro of a city that has been waiting, with the patience of a place that knows what is coming, for the season to arrive.
Saranda in May is the Albanian Riviera at the precise point of maximum availability, and it will not last. By June the word will have spread further. By July it will be a different city. Come in May, while it is still this.
What to do in Saranda in May – Albania360 approved!
The Promenade and the Bay: The City at First Light
The promenade of Saranda, the pedestrian boulevard that follows the curve of the bay from the port in the south to the eastern point where the steps lead down to the water and the view of Corfu on the horizon is clear enough on most May mornings that the island seems to float just beyond the reach of a strong swimmer, is in May at the finest hour of its day between six and eight in the morning. The cafes are just opening. The fishing boats are returning to the port with the night’s catch. The bay is still and the water in the early light is the specific deep blue of the Ionian before the sun is high enough to turn it turquoise, a blue that is different from any other blue on the Mediterranean coast and that the city has been looking at from this promenade for as long as the promenade has existed.
Lekuresi Castle: The Finest View in the South
On the hill above Saranda, reached by a road that winds up through the olive trees and the terraced gardens above the city to a height of two hundred and seventeen metres above the bay, the ruins of Lekuresi Castle offer the finest panoramic view available from any accessible point on the southern Albanian coast. The castle itself, built in the 16th century during the Ottoman period and subsequently abandoned, is more atmospheric than monumental: the walls and towers in various states of picturesque decay, the wildflowers of the late Albanian spring growing in the cracks of the old stonework in May with a particular colour and profusion that the summer heat will burn away by July. But the view from its highest point is definitive and unqualified: Saranda and its bay below you, the Ionian stretching south and west, the Greek island of Corfu on the horizon close enough that you can make out the shape of its mountains, and the Albanian coast extending north toward Ksamil and the beaches of the summer season.