Vjosa Wild River National Park

Getting there

car. There is no gate and no single entrance, because the park is a river. The pin marks the Këlcyrë gorge, roughly halfway along the Albanian stretch and the easiest place to stand beside it; Përmet and Tepelenë are the two towns on it.

Parking: At the road pull-offs through the gorge, and in Përmet or Tepelenë.

Photography

Best light: golden, morning.

The braided channels and gravel islands are the subject and they only read from height, which is the one thing a drone is genuinely better at here. Check requirements with the AAC before travelling.

Drone: not confirmed. Albania's registration requirement is reported differently by every secondary source, so verify with the AAC before you fly.

The Vjosa was declared the first Wild River National Park in Europe at a ceremony in Tepelenë on 15 March 2023. It runs 270 kilometres in all and 190 of them are in Albania, and over that distance it flows naturally undisturbed through narrow canyons, rapids, islands and bends: no dam, no channel, no straightening. The park covers 12,727 hectares and carries IUCN Category II, which is aimed at protecting it from dams, gravel extraction and other damaging activities.

What that protection actually bought is the thing worth understanding. A free-flowing river of this length is not rare in Albania by accident and it is not rare in Europe by accident either; the Vjosa is the last one at this scale on the continent, and it spent years as a hydropower prospect before it became a park.

A 190-kilometre river has no single point, so the pin on this page is a choice rather than an address: it marks the Këlcyrë gorge, about halfway down the Albanian stretch. Përmet and the Benjë springs sit upstream of it and Tepelenë downstream, and the Drino, Kardhiq, Bënçë and Shushicë all feed it. Everything about the year here is flow rather than temperature.