Private Full-Day Kruja Tour from Tirana & Durres

This is our four Kruja tours joined into one private day. The car and the guide are yours from pickup to drop-off, with no other guests and no fixed meeting point. We collect you from your hotel in Tirana, from Tirana Airport (Rinas), or from Durres and the beach resorts at Golem, and the day ends in Tirana, so it also works if you are moving from the coast to the capital. The price is €250 for the whole group, for one to four people.

The morning is Kruja itself. You walk down the Old Bazaar (Çarshia e Vjeter), the cobbled Ottoman market street where artisans still weave carpets and work silver, then go up into Kruja Castle with your guide, on the trail of Skanderbeg and through the lanes inside the walls that most visitors miss. One of the two museums in the citadel fits into the morning if you want it, with the entrance fee paid at the door.

Before lunch the road climbs seven kilometres up Mali i Krujes to a ledge 1,150 m above sea level. A steep staircase goes down to the cave shrine of Sari Salltik, with its sacred spring, the tomb and a small mosque said to be the oldest in Albania. From there we drive north into the mountains, stopping at Shkembi i Vajes, the Rock of the Maidens, on the way up to Qafshtama National Park. Lunch is at one of the small restaurants by the park, and there is time to fill a bottle at the Spring of the Queen Mother and walk under the black pines. No bus or furgon goes to Qafshtama.

The day ends in the Zeza river canyon near the village of Nikel, on the way back to Tirana. A broad stone path, once a caravan route through these mountains, runs from the Bridge of Abdyl Agha, built around 1810 to 1820, through the Natural Gate and past green pools to the 18th-century Bridge of Kurcaj. Then we drive you to your hotel in Tirana or to the airport. Plan on about ten and a half hours door to door. We agree the order of the stops with you when you book, and in winter, when it gets dark early, we may run them in a different order.