Montenegro vs Albania: how to choose between two Balkan beachfront countries

04.10.2024 - 13:35 / lonelyplanet.com

Oct 4, 2024 • 7 min read

You may already be plotting next year's summer holiday. Perhaps you're looking at places like Greece, Italy and Croatia, but would prefer fewer crowds or more affordable prices. If so, it's worth skipping over to their beautiful neighbors, Montenegro and Albania.

These two Balkan powerhouses – where Adriatic coastlines meet lively small towns and rugged mountains meet the sea – bring their own flavor to a European getaway. While popular tourist regions like the Bay of Kotor and the Albanian Riviera attract big numbers, there are still plenty of tucked-away corners where you'll easily find space to breathe. The only question is, which destination do you choose? Two of our expert writers have chosen sides, arguing in favor of the country they feel most passionately about. Can they tempt you to come over to their side? Or perhaps they'll end up convincing you to visit both?

Author of over a dozen guidebooks and contributor to 40 more, Rudolf Abraham has been visiting Montenegro for more than 20 years, lived in neighboring Croatia, and wrote the first English-language guides to hiking in Montenegro as well as the Peaks of the Balkans in Montenegro, Kosovo and Albania.

Within an area not much larger than the Falkland Islands – that’s less than half the size of Albania – Montenegro packs in a walloping punch. Behind that balmy, sun-drenched coastline, there’s a wildly convoluted landscape, which looks like someone scrunched up the Earth’s surface in order to fit in as many rock-strewn mountains as possible.

If you love your great outdoors wild and untamed, there’s little in Europe to match Montenegro. Rugged, remote and awe-inspiring, Montenegro’s spectacularly beautiful mountains are a hiker’s paradise, including five national parks, and with a well-marked network of hiking trails leading you off into the back of beyond. Slicing right through one of the highest areas, Durmitor National Park is one of the deepest canyons in Europe, carved by the River Tara as it snakes its way beneath near-vertical walls. Fancy trying out some truly world-beating white water rafting? The River Tara is the one for you. And if it’s culture you’re after rather than adrenaline, hidden away among these mountains, you’ll find some extraordinary medieval monasteries – from the Morača Monastery with its 13th-century frescoes to Ostrog, which is built into the face of a cliff.

And then there’s the coast. Both Montenegro and Albania sit on a gorgeous stretch of the Adriatic, facing Italy – but something that Montenegro has, and Albania does not, is the Bay of Kotor. This wildly indented bit of coastline enclosing a bay shaped like a double anvil – the entrance to which is narrow enough that they used to hang a