Things to Do in Albania in February

Berat in February is the version of this city that existed before travel blogs found it. The Mangalem and Gorica quarters, stacked up opposing hillsides above the Osum River, are the reason Berat earned its UNESCO designation and its nickname, the City of a Thousand Windows. In February those windows catch the low winter sun and light up the limestone facades in a way the flat summer glare cannot match. Walk uphill through Mangalem past the 15th-century King's Mosque and the lead-domed Helveti Tekke to Berat Castle, a fortress that has been continuously inhabited since the 4th century BC, where a handful of families still live among Byzantine churches with frescoed interiors. The Onufri Museum inside the castle walls houses icons by the 16th-century master whose use of a particular red pigment has never been chemically replicated. With February foot traffic near zero, you can stand alone in front of those icons for as long as you want, which in summer is not remotely possible. Allow a full day, with the morning in the castle and the afternoon wandering Gorica across the Ottoman footbridge.

The Vjosa is the last wild river in Europe, undammed from its source in Greece's Pindus Mountains to the Adriatic, and in February the water runs high and fast from winter rains. This is not the gentle float-trip version of the Vjosa that summer visitors get. February rafting out of Permet pushes through Class II and III rapids in the Kelcyre Gorge, where the canyon walls rise 300 m (984 ft) on either side and the water is cold enough that you feel the spray through your drysuit before the raft even hits the first chute. The gorge smells like wet limestone and wild sage, and the only sounds are the rapids ahead and the occasional hawk circling above the rim. Horse riding excursions through the national park's lower valleys, where the terrain opens into meadows flanked by oak forest, are also at their atmospheric best in winter, with the trails soft underfoot and the air carrying woodsmoke from the shepherds' huts scattered across the floodplain. Permet itself is a small town known for its thermal springs and its gliko, the spoon sweets made from walnuts, figs, and sour cherries that every household produces and every cafe serves alongside thick Turkish coffee.

Albania's capital rewards slow walking in February, when the cafe terraces along the Blloku neighborhood's main strip are populated by Tiranas doing what they do best, which is drinking espresso with a seriousness that rivals Milan. Blloku was the sealed residential compound of the Communist Party elite until 1991. Enver Hoxha's villa still stands on Rruga Deshmoret e 4 Shkurtit, now surrounded by cocktail bars and gelato shops in what might be the most pointed piece of urban irony in the Balkans. The National Gallery of Arts on Bulevardi Deshmoret e Kombit houses Socialist Realist paintings that are fascinating precisely because Albania's isolation under Hoxha produced a strain of the genre found nowhere else, stranger and more intense than the Soviet or Chinese versions. Walk from there to the Bunk'Art museums, the first in a massive Cold War bunker behind the prime ministry and the second in a concrete pillbox in the city center, both converting Hoxha's paranoid infrastructure into exhibition space. The pyramid, Hoxha's intended mausoleum designed by his daughter and son-in-law, has been controversially redeveloped as a technology and youth center. February's quieter pace means you can talk to the Tirana locals who staff these places, and they will tell you stories about the Communist period that no guidebook carries.

Gjirokaster's Ottoman-era houses are not decorative restorations. They are fortified tower dwellings built by feudal families in the 17th and 18th centuries, with stone ground floors for livestock, defensive upper stories with carved wooden ceilings, and roof slates quarried from the surrounding mountains that give the whole city its distinctive grey silhouette. In February, woodsmoke from the chimneys mixes with the smell of damp slate, and the cobblestoned lanes of the bazaar quarter have a particular echo when they are empty that disappears entirely in summer. The Gjirokaster Castle, one of the largest in the Balkans, perches above the city with views down the Drino Valley that extend to the Greek border on a clear February day. Inside the castle, a captured American Air Force jet from the Cold War sits incongruously in the courtyard, and the ethnographic museum occupies the house where Hoxha was born, a fact the museum curators handle with the complicated ambivalence it deserves. Walk from the castle down through the bazaar to the Zekate House, the finest surviving tower house, where the carved wooden ceiling of the guest room took craftsmen two years to complete. The hammam in the old bazaar, recently restored, is a 16th-century Ottoman bathhouse where you can still trace the underfloor heating channels.

Shkoder opens the Albanian Alps. Yet the city deserves days on its own. Come in February. The lakefront promenade along Lake Skadar, the largest lake in southern Europe, empties out. You hear water lapping stones. The Marubi National Museum of Photography holds a collection few outside Albania know: over 500,000 negatives dating to 1858. These document Albanian life from Ottoman occupation through independence through Communism. The intimacy and technical skill rival anything in the European photographic canon. Rozafa Castle rises above the city, built on Illyrian foundations and rebuilt by every civilization that later occupied Shkoder. February views take in the lake, the Buna River where it exits toward the Adriatic, and on clear days the snow-dusted peaks of the Accursed Mountains to the northeast. The cafe culture here arguably beats Tirana's. It centers on pedestrian Rruga Kole Idromeno. The espresso is good enough and cheap enough that three coffees before noon is standard local practice. February brings prime birdwatching on Lake Skadar. Dalmatian pelicans, pygmy cormorants, and wintering raptors concentrate on the Albanian shore.

Permet sits in the Vjosa valley surrounded by walnut orchards and thermal springs. February is when both peak. The Benja Thermal Baths are a series of natural hot spring pools built into the stone arches of an 18th-century Ottoman bridge over the Lengarice River. Winter makes them most dramatic. Steam rises off mineral-rich water into cold morning air. Canyon walls drip with moss and wild ferns. The contrast of hot sulfurous water against cool air on your skin is sharper in February than any other month. Permet holds Albania's food capital reputation through its gliko tradition. These are spoon sweets preserved in sugar syrup from every fruit and nut the valley produces: walnut, sour cherry, fig, watermelon rind, bergamot, even aubergine. In February families still work through the previous autumn's production. Cafes along Permet's main street serve them alongside raki distilled from local grapes in October. Walnut gliko tastes sticky-sweet with a bitter tannic edge from the green walnut husks. Pair it with a small glass of raki that burns clean with a faintly floral finish. This Albanian experience does not translate to description. You simply have to be sitting in a Permet cafe with the woodstove going to understand it.