Tirana: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
Tirana was a town of fifteen thousand people when Albania made it the capital in 1920, and everything in the centre was built to make a capital out of it in a hurry — the Italians laid out the boulevard, the communists put up the ministries and the museum mosaic, and after 1991 the square was a car park with a Hoxha statue in it until the statue came down. It was closed to traffic in 2017 and paved in stone brought from every region in the country. Two hours, flat, and almost all of it is free.
A short history of Tirana
Tirana is a relatively young city. In 1614 Sulejman Pasha, a local nobleman, built a mosque, a bakery and a bathhouse here, and a settlement began to grow around them. For almost three hundred years it remained a market town on the edge of the Ottoman Empire. In 1920 the Congress of Lushnjë chose it as the temporary capital of Albania, then a newly independent state, and the choice became permanent. From 1944 until his death in 1985 Albania was ruled by Enver Hoxha, who closed the country off from the world almost completely. In 2000 Edi Rama, a painter by profession, was elected mayor and had the grey concrete buildings painted in bold colours.
The ten best sights in Tirana
1Et’hem Bey MosqueFree, from 1823, and the frescoes inside show trees and waterfalls
2Clock Tower200 lek, 90 steps, and it was the tallest building in Tirana until 1970
3National History Museum700 lek, and the mosaic on the front is the best-known image in Albania
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4Bunk’Art 1
1,000 lek, a five-storey nuclear bunker of 106 rooms, and it was secret until 2014
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5Bunk’Art 2
500 lek, in the centre, and it is about the secret police
6House of Leaves700 lek, the surveillance house, and the bugging equipment is still in it
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7Pyramid of Tirana
Free, built as Hoxha’s mausoleum museum, and you climb the outside
8National Art Gallery500 lek, and the socialist realism room is why people come
9Opera and BalletFrom 500 lek, in the Palace of Culture, and the cheapest opera anywhere
10Resurrection CathedralFree, Orthodox, from 2012, and one of the largest in the Balkans
Scan with your phone camera to open the map there
What is an audio walk?
Tours in Tirana →A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Tirana:
Free walking tours in Tirana
The square that changed its mind
Tirana was a town of fifteen thousand people when Albania made it the capital in 1920, and everything in the centre was built to make a capital out of it in a hurry — the Italians laid out the boulevard, the communists put up the ministries and the museum mosaic, and after 1991 the square was a car park with a Hoxha statue in it until the statue came down. It was closed to traffic in 2017 and paved in stone brought from every region in the country. Two hours, flat, and almost all of it is free.
- Skanderbeg Square · The whole forty thousand square metres is very slightly raised in the middle, like a flattened pyramid, so that rain runs off and so that from one side you cannot see the far edge. The paving is stone from every region of Albania, laid in bands, and the trees around it are species from each of those regions too.
- Et’hem Bey Mosque · The frescoes inside show trees, waterfalls and bridges — landscapes, in a mosque, which is almost unheard of. In 1967 Albania declared itself the first atheist state in the world and closed every religious building; this one was kept as a monument. On the sixteenth of January 1991 ten thousand people walked into it without permission, and the police did not stop them.
- Clock Tower · Built in 1822 by the same family that built the mosque, and for a hundred and fifty years it was the tallest thing in Tirana. The first clock in it came from Venice and was replaced by a German one in 1928; a man was employed to wind it every day, and the job was handed down in one family.
- National History Museum · The mosaic across the front is called The Albanians and it is the most reproduced image in the country. Look at the figure on the far right: after 1991 she was quietly repainted, because the original held a rifle and a red star over her head, and both were taken out.
- Rruga Murat Toptani · The first street in Tirana closed to cars, and the wall running along one side of it is the only visible piece of the Byzantine castle the town grew around — the stone goes back to about the fourth century, and the shops and flats were simply built up against it and have been using it as a back wall ever since.
- Tanners’ Bridge · An Ottoman stone bridge of the eighteenth century that carried the livestock road into the tanners’ quarter, and it now crosses nothing at all — the stream under it was diverted in the 1930s and the bridge was buried in rubbish until it was dug out and restored in 1990.
A hundred and seventy thousand bunkers
Enver Hoxha ran Albania for forty years, broke with Yugoslavia, then the Soviet Union, then China, and convinced himself the whole world was about to invade. The country built concrete bunkers in its fields and streets — around a hundred and seventy thousand of them, for a population of three million — and the leadership built two enormous ones they never admitted existed. Both are now museums, and the surveillance house is a third. Three hours, and this one is heavy going.
- Bunk’Art 1 · Five storeys down into a hillside, a hundred and six rooms, built between 1972 and 1978 for Hoxha and the Politburo to survive a nuclear strike, with its own air supply and an assembly hall. Almost nobody in Albania knew it existed until it opened as a museum in 2014, and Hoxha himself never once used it.
- Postbllok Memorial · Three objects standing together on a traffic island: a real bunker taken out of a field, two concrete pillars from the Spaç mine where political prisoners were worked, and a section of the Berlin Wall that Germany sent. It marks the checkpoint where the guards stood who kept ordinary Albanians out of Blloku.
- Blloku · Until 1991 no Albanian without a pass could walk into these few streets — the Politburo lived here and Hoxha’s villa is still standing on the corner, unremarkable, three storeys. The day the barriers came down in December 1991 people walked in just to look, and within five years it was the bar quarter.
- House of Leaves · Built in 1931 as the first maternity clinic in Albania, and taken over by the Sigurimi as the technical centre for surveillance — every telephone tap and hidden microphone in the country was run from this building. The equipment is still in the rooms, and so are the files on who informed on whom.
- Bunk’Art 2 · The entrance is a concrete dome that looks like a bunker rising out of the pavement, and it was built in 2016 — but the tunnel it leads into is real, dug under the Interior Ministry in the 1980s. The museum names the people the security service executed, imprisoned or interned, year by year.
- Pyramid of Tirana · Hoxha’s daughter and her husband designed it as his memorial museum and it opened in 1988, three years after he died. Since then it has been a conference centre, a NATO base during the Kosovo war, a nightclub and a ruin covered in graffiti; in 2023 it reopened with staircases up the outside and a technology school inside.
Paint, mountain and coffee
In 2000 the new mayor of Tirana, a painter by training, began having the grey concrete blocks painted in bright colours — no new windows, no repairs, just paint. He argued publicly that it would change how people behaved in the street, and the shopkeepers started taking the bars off their windows. That is the city this walk is in: not restored, repainted, and drinking coffee about it. Two and a half hours, and the cable car at the end takes fifteen minutes.
- Rruga e Kavajës · This is where the painting started. Edi Rama, elected mayor in 2000 with no money for anything else, put orange and purple and green on the blocks and argued that a city that looks cared for gets treated as cared for. Shopkeepers along here took the grilles off their windows within a year, and he later became prime minister.
- Pazari i Ri · The market had been here since the 1930s and was a mess of corrugated iron; it was rebuilt in 2017 with a proper hall and the lanes around it paved. The stalls sell what the villages bring down in the morning, and the mountain honey and the dried figs come from the north by bus.
- Reja · A pavilion of thin white steel tubes designed by the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto and first shown at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2013. Albania bought it, shipped it, and stood it in a park next to the Pyramid — a piece of international architecture acquired second-hand, which is a very Tirana way to do it.
- Grand Park · Two hundred and thirty hectares with an artificial lake in the middle, dug in the 1950s with voluntary labour — which in practice meant students and soldiers with shovels. The loop round the lake is five kilometres and at six in the evening half the city is walking or running it.
- Martyrs’ Cemetery · Twenty-eight thousand partisans are buried on the hillside, and the twelve-metre Mother Albania stands at the top holding a star and a laurel wreath. Hoxha was buried here in 1985 with a sixteen-tonne marble slab over him; in 1992 the grave was opened and the body moved to a public cemetery outside town.
- Mount Dajti · The cable car runs four and a half kilometres up the side of the mountain in fifteen minutes and it is the longest in the Balkans; it opened in 2005 and was built by an Austrian firm. The top is at over a thousand metres and is ten degrees cooler than the city, which is why Tirana goes up there in August.
Getting to Tirana and getting around
- Nënë Tereza Airport · 17 kilometres out, the bus is 400 lek, and it runs every hour
- Bus Terminal · Buses to Shkodër, Berat and Durrës, and tickets on the bus
- Skanderbeg Square · Everything starts here, and the whole square is pedestrian since 2017
- Dajti Ekspres · 1,000 lek return, 15 minutes, and the longest cable car in the Balkans
Cheap eats in Tirana
Eight counters where Tirana eats standing. Byrek is the whole morning — filo pastry with cheese, spinach or minced meat, cut from a tray and handed over in paper for about a hundred lek, and the shops that sell it are called byrektore and open at six. The national dish is tavë kosi, lamb baked under a crust of yoghurt and egg, which comes from Elbasan an hour away. Albania has more coffee bars per head than any country in the world, and a macchiato is a hundred lek.
- Pazari i Ri · Open 7 to 7, and the restaurants round it are open later
- Oda · About 800 lek a main, by the bazaar, and book in the evening
- Mullixhiu · About 1,200 lek a main, by the Grand Park, and book
- Zgara e Tiranës · Grilled meat and nothing else, and about 500 lek a plate
- Sofra e Ariut · Big plates, local crowd, and about 600 lek
- Era · The reliable one in Blloku, open late, and about 700 lek
- Komiteti · A raki is about 200 lek, and it opens at nine in the morning
- Hemingway Bar · Coffee by day and cocktails after nine, and no cover
Museums in Tirana
- Bunk’Art 1 · 1,000 lek, two hours inside, and it is cold — take a jacket
- House of Leaves · 700 lek, an hour, and it is the hardest of the three
- Bunk’Art 2 · 500 lek, in the centre, and an hour is enough
- National History Museum · 700 lek, and the icon room upstairs is the quiet surprise
- National Art Gallery · 500 lek, closed Mondays, and the sculpture yard is free
- Tirana Mosaic · 200 lek, a third-century villa floor, and five minutes inside
- Skanderbeg Museum · 500 lek, in Krujë castle, and Hoxha’s daughter designed it
- Durrës Amphitheatre · 300 lek, 40 minutes west, and a man found it in his garden in 1966
Nature and day trips near Tirana
Tirana sits in a bowl with a sixteen-hundred-metre mountain on one side and the sea forty minutes away on the other, and a cable car connects the city to the mountain in a quarter of an hour. The park in the middle of town is bigger than the old city and free.
- Mount Dajti · 1,000 lek return, and it does not run in high wind
- Grand Park · Free, 230 hectares, and a five-kilometre loop round the lake
- Botanical Garden · 200 lek, from 1964, and fourteen hectares almost nobody enters
- Bovilla Lake · An hour north, a taxi is about 4,000 lek return
- Durrës · 40 minutes west, the nearest sea, and the beach runs ten kilometres
- Petrela Castle · 200 lek, 20 minutes south, and there is a terrace restaurant in it
- Theth · Four hours north, and the road is open May to October
- Llogara Pass · Four hours south, 1,027 metres, and the sea is straight below
Things to do in Tirana with kids
- Dajti Ekspres · 1,000 lek return, 15 minutes each way, and glass cabins
- Grand Park · Free, pedal boats on the lake and playgrounds on the north side
- Tirana Zoo · 300 lek, small and old, and the park around it is the better part
- Pyramid of Tirana · Free to climb the outside, and the view is the whole centre
- Bunk’Art 2 · 500 lek, a real tunnel under the street, and an hour inside
- Reja · Free, a steel cloud you walk through, and a café inside it
- Durrës beach · 40 minutes west, shallow sand, and the train goes there
- Krujë Castle · 400 lek, real walls to climb on, and a bazaar at the gate
Nightlife in Tirana
Everything happens in Blloku, the few streets the Politburo lived in until 1991, and it happens late — nothing fills before eleven. Drinks are cheap by any European measure, a beer is around three hundred lek, and nobody queues anywhere.
- Blloku · Everything is within four streets, and it starts at eleven
- Radio Bar · A room full of valve radios, small, and it has never changed
- Komiteti · Forty kinds of village raki, and it opens at nine in the morning
- Nouvelle Vague · Records on the wall and the cocktails are serious
- Hemingway Bar · Open from morning coffee straight through to two
- Tulla Culture Centre · Gigs in a converted workshop yard, and usually free in
- Tirana Castle · Bars built against a Byzantine wall, and open till one
- Rruga Murat Toptani · The pedestrian street fills up at nine and empties at midnight
Holy places in Tirana
Albania declared itself the first officially atheist state in the world in 1967 and closed or demolished more than two thousand churches and mosques. Everything on this list either survived as a listed monument or was built after 1991, and the country is now about half Muslim, a fifth Christian, and famously relaxed about the difference.
- Et’hem Bey Mosque · Free, shoes off, and women cover their hair
- Namazgah Mosque · Free, finished in 2024, and it holds eight thousand people
- Resurrection Cathedral · Free, Orthodox, consecrated in 2012, and the dome is 32 metres
- St Paul’s Cathedral · Free, and the airport is named after her too
- Clock Tower · 200 lek, and it rang the call to prayer when the mosque could not
- Martyrs’ Cemetery · Free, 28,000 graves, and Hoxha was dug up from it in 1992
- Krujë Castle · 400 lek, an hour north, and the bazaar is at the gate
- Rozafa Castle · 400 lek, above Shkodër, and the legend in it is about a walled-up woman
Frequently asked questions about Tirana
What is there to see in Tirana?
The top sights in Tirana are Et’hem Bey Mosque, Clock Tower and National History Museum. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Tirana?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Tirana without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Tirana?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Tirana, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The square that changed its mind.
How do you get to Tirana and get around?
The main ways are Nënë Tereza Airport, Bus Terminal and Skanderbeg Square. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Tirana, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Tirana that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.
Looking for a hotel in Tirana for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.