There are cities you visit and cities that visit you — that follow you home, linger in your thoughts, and pull you back. Gjirokaster is the second kind. Perched on the steep slopes of the Drino Valley in southern Albania, this UNESCO World Heritage city is built from the mountain itself: grey limestone rooftops, cobblestone streets worn smooth by centuries of footsteps, and Ottoman tower houses that lean into the hillside as if they grew there naturally. It is one of the most extraordinary places in Europe, and most people have never heard of it.
Download the Albania360 app
Our Albania360 app makes it easy for everyone to discover hidden gems, explore 360 views of places before visiting, plan their meals & coffee dates, find perfect accommodations & book directly on the app, and much more!
March is when Gjirokaster is at its most quietly spectacular. The harsh light of summer has not yet arrived. The tour groups are still at home. The surrounding hills, dormant through winter, are beginning to turn a deep, luminous green. And the city — this ancient, stubborn, silver city — opens itself to the few who are wise enough to come early.
Things to do in Gjirokaster in March:
Walk the Old Bazaar
At the heart of Gjirokaster lies its Old Bazaar — a labyrinth of cobbled lanes, stone-built shops, and Ottoman facades that dates back over five centuries. It was once one of the great trading hubs of the southern Balkans, where merchants brought carpets, silver, spices, and stories from across the region. Today it remains the social and cultural soul of the city, alive with artisans, small cafes, and the scent of roasted coffee drifting out of open doorways.
In March, without the summer crowds, you can walk its lanes slowly and without rush. Browse handmade filigree jewellery, carved olive-wood bowls, and embroidered textiles. Stop at a small cajtore — a traditional tea house — and order mountain tea or a glass of raki. Watch the shopkeepers arrange their wares in the pale morning light. This is Gjirokaster at its most genuine, and it is exactly as beautiful as it sounds.
Climb to Gjirokaster Castle
Rising above the old town on a rocky ridge, Gjirokaster Castle is one of the most impressive fortresses in the Balkans. Its origins reach back to the 12th century, though it was substantially expanded under the Ottoman ruler Ali Pasha of Ioannina in the early 19th century. What you see today is a place of extraordinary layered history: medieval walls, a clock tower, a church, underground prison cells used by King Zog, the Italian and German occupiers during World War Two, and later by Albania’s communist regime, and a captured American Air Force plane sitting incongruously in the open air — a relic of Cold War paranoia that somehow makes perfect sense here.
The castle museum is one of the best in Albania. It is well-written, deeply human, and completely gripping — the kind of museum where you find yourself reading every single word. Allow at least two to three hours, and climb to the rooftop for what is arguably the finest view in all of southern Albania: the old town spreading down the hillside below you, the Drino Valley stretching wide and green, and the mountains of the Albanian-Greek borderlands rising in the distance.
In March, the castle closes at 5pm. Plan to arrive in the afternoon so the light is with you.
Go Underground: The Cold War Tunnel
Beneath the streets of Gjirokaster, hidden from the world for decades, lies one of Albania’s strangest and most haunting attractions: an 800-metre underground bunker built in secret during the 1970s by the communist dictator Enver Hoxha. With 59 rooms, blast-proof doors, and enough supplies to sustain the regime’s leadership through a nuclear attack, it is a monument to paranoia on a truly spectacular scale.
Today it is open to visitors as the Cold War Tunnel Museum, guided by a passionate curator whose knowledge and storytelling bring the absurdity and horror of the era to life. The tour takes around 20 minutes, but the feeling it leaves you with lasts considerably longer. Walking through those low concrete corridors, you understand something about Albania’s 20th century that no history book can quite convey.
Note: opening hours in March run from 8am to 2pm, so plan your visit for the morning.
Visit the Zekate House and the Ottoman Tower Houses
Gjirokaster is famous across Albania for its kullat — the grand Ottoman-era tower houses that belong to the city’s wealthiest families. These multi-storey stone mansions, with their wooden interiors, carved ceilings, and rooms arranged around a central hearth, represent one of the finest traditions of domestic architecture in the entire Balkan peninsula.
The Zekate House is the most magnificent of them, a grand two-towered mansion from the 19th century that is beautifully preserved and open to visitors. Its views over the valley are alone worth the climb. But Gjirokaster has other houses too — the Skenduli House, still run by the family who owns it, where the daughter personally guides visitors through the wedding room, the guest quarters, and the bunker built into the foundations during the communist era. These are not museum exhibits. They are living memories.
Hike to Ali Pasha’s Bridge
One of the most rewarding things you can do in Gjirokaster in March is the hike to what locals call Ali Pasha’s Bridge — though it is not a bridge at all. It is the last surviving span of a vast aqueduct commissioned in the early 19th century by Ali Pasha of Ioannina to carry water from mountain springs ten kilometres away down to the castle’s cisterns. In the 1930s, most of it was dismantled, its stones dragged back up the hill to build prison cells within the fortress. A single arch remains, standing alone in a narrow gorge, surrounded by silence.
The walk from the castle takes around 45 minutes uphill, mostly along a quiet road before descending on a rocky path into the valley. In March, the surrounding hills are coming back to life, wildflowers beginning to push through the grass, and the air carrying that particular freshness that only early spring in the mountains has. It is a beautiful, slightly melancholy walk — fitting for a city built on beautiful, slightly melancholy things.
Step Back Further: The Ruins of Antigonea
Fourteen kilometres east of Gjirokaster, on a plateau above the Drino Valley, lie the ruins of Antigonea — a Hellenistic city founded in 295 BC by King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who named it after his first wife. For two centuries it was one of the most important political and cultural centres of the ancient world in this region, before it was destroyed by Roman forces in 167 BC and never rebuilt.
Today it is an archaeological park of extraordinary atmosphere. Defensive walls, temple foundations, mosaic floors, and the outlines of ancient streets lie scattered across a hillside covered in olive trees and wildflowers. In March, before the summer heat, the site feels genuinely remote and unhurried — the kind of place where you can stand among ruins thousands of years old and hear nothing but wind and birdsong. It is one of southern Albania’s hidden gems, and most visitors to Gjirokaster never make it there.
Day Trip to the Blue Eye
About 35 kilometres south of Gjirokaster, just off the road toward Saranda, lies one of the most extraordinary natural phenomena in Albania: Syri i Kalter — the Blue Eye. A deep freshwater spring rising from an unknown source far underground, its waters are so clear and so intensely, impossibly blue that photographs of it are routinely dismissed as edited. They are not.
The spring sits in a shaded forest clearing, its surface shimmering between deep sapphire and turquoise as the light shifts. In March, before the summer swimmers arrive, it is at its most serene and pristine. The surrounding forest is just beginning to fill with new leaves. The water, fed by underground mountain sources, runs ice-cold year-round. You will not want to leave.
Walk the Manalat Quarter at Dusk
Above the castle, on the steepest part of the hill, lies the Manalat Quarter — the oldest residential neighbourhood in Gjirokaster, a place of narrow lanes, crumbling stone walls, and views that open suddenly and unexpectedly over the entire valley below. It is largely untouched by tourism and quietly extraordinary.
Walk through it in the late afternoon as the light turns golden and the mountains across the valley begin to darken. You will pass old women in doorways, small vegetable gardens behind stone walls, cats asleep on warm limestone steps. The city will feel, in that hour, entirely yours. That is the gift of March.
The Two Sons of Gjirokaster
No visit to Gjirokaster is complete without understanding the strange, defining fact about this city: it is the birthplace of two of the most important figures in modern Albanian history, and they could not be more different. Enver Hoxha, the communist dictator who isolated Albania from the world for nearly half a century, was born here. And Ismail Kadare, Albania’s greatest living writer — author of Chronicle in Stone, a novel set in wartime Gjirokaster — was also born here, within walking distance of Hoxha’s house.
One imprisoned a nation. The other gave it a voice. Their childhood homes still stand in the old town, and the tension between them — between the city’s pride and its shame, its beauty and its darkness — is part of what makes Gjirokaster so alive, so charged, so impossible to forget. If you read Chronicle in Stone before you arrive, you will see the city differently. We strongly recommend it.
Eat Well
Gjirokaster’s cuisine is deeply rooted in the traditions of southern Albania and heavily influenced by the city’s Greek minority population. Look for qifqi — small fried rice balls seasoned with wild mint, a local speciality you will find nowhere else in Albania — as well as qofte (grilled meatballs), stuffed peppers, stuffed grape leaves, and slow-cooked lamb dishes that have been perfecting themselves for centuries. Fresh bread, homemade wine, local cheese, and a glass of raki at the end of a long day: this is the rhythm of eating in Gjirokaster, and it is a very good rhythm indeed.
Start your mornings in one of the small cafes near the bazaar with strong Albanian coffee and fresh bread with homemade jam. End your evenings in the old town, where the restaurants are lit by warm light and the conversation of locals fills the narrow lanes long after dark.
Getting There and When to Visit
Gjirokaster is roughly three hours from Tirana by car via the SH4 highway — one of Albania’s most scenic drives, passing through mountain passes and the beautiful Drino Valley. Buses and minibuses also connect Gjirokaster with Tirana, Saranda, and other major cities throughout the day.
March sits at the very beginning of spring, with temperatures ranging from around 8 to 14 degrees Celsius. Some rain is likely, especially early in the month, but the days are lengthening and the light is extraordinary. Pack layers and a waterproof jacket. The castle and Cold War Tunnel both have shorter opening hours in March — check times before you visit and plan accordingly.
Plan to stay at least two nights. One is not enough. Gjirokaster is not a city you see. It is a city you inhabit, however briefly, and leaving it too quickly is a mistake you will regret on the drive home.
Gjirokaster in March is a Gift You Give Yourself
Most people who come to Albania head for the beaches, the mountains, or Tirana. They see Gjirokaster on a map, think it looks interesting, and tell themselves they will come back for it next time. Some of them do. Many of them don’t, and they carry that as a small, particular regret.
Do not make that mistake. Come to Gjirokaster in March, when the stone rooftops glisten after rain, when the surrounding hills are the deepest green they will be all year, when the city is quiet enough that you can hear your own footsteps on the cobblestones. Come before the crowds. Come for the castle and the bunker and the ruins and the hike and the food and the coffee and the views. Come, above all, because there is nowhere else in Europe quite like this.
Download the Albania360 app
Our Albania360 app makes it easy for everyone to discover hidden gems, explore 360 views of places before visiting, plan their meals & coffee dates, find perfect accommodations & book directly on the app, and much more!