Visit Albania .guide

Road trip · six corridors

[ Albania is a driving country ]

There is no train worth the name and the bus network thins out exactly where the good roads start. These are the six drives the rest of the site keeps referring to, each with the line it follows and the season it keeps.

The map

The basemap loads when you reach it. Every marker below is a link, with or without it.

Every marker as a list

The driveRoadDistanceRouterVerdict
Tirana to ShkodërThe northern spine on the SH1, and the drive every Alps trip makes twice.national road98.6 km1 h 56October: best
Shkodër to ThethPaved now, and shut by snow whenever the road authority cannot clear it, over the Qafa e Thorës into the Alps.mountain road91.7 km3 h 27touring route via Razëm, BogëOctober: ok
Tirana to BeratOut across the Myzeqe plain to the white Ottoman town, with a monastery and a Greek city on the way.national road152.7 km2 h 32touring route via Ardenica MonasteryOctober: best
Berat to GjirokastërThe inland road between the two UNESCO towns, over the hills and down the Vjosa through Përmet.mountain road152.3 km3 h 30touring route via PërmetOctober: best
Gjirokastër to SarandëDown out of the Drino valley to the sea, with the karst spring of the Blue Eye on the way.national road58.8 km2 htouring route via Blue Eye of SarandëOctober: best
Vlorë to Sarandë, the RivieraOver the Llogara pass at 1,027 m and down the SH8 along the Ionian, which is the drive people come for.coastal road125.2 km3 h 35touring route via Llogara Pass, Dhërmi, Himarë, BorshOctober: best
Tirana to Pogradec and KorçëThe road east to the lake and the highland, and the one drive that gets better as the coast empties.national road179.8 km4 h 10touring route via Lin, PogradecOctober: best
Tirana to PeshkopiThe drive into the north-east, transformed by the tunnel road through the mountains and still ending in another country's shadow.mountain road91 km1 h 52October: ok

Distances and drive times are what OSRM returned over OpenStreetMap data on 2026-08-26, routed through each corridor’s own waypoints. Where a drive names a touring route, the figures are for that route through its stops, not for the quickest drive between its two ends. They are a measurement of the road, not a promise about your afternoon: nobody drives the Riviera without stopping, and the router does not know that.