Albania received 12.4 million foreign visitors in 2025 - six point six per cent more than the year before. That is a number the neighbours usually greet with a smirk or with envy, rarely with the question of how it was built. And Tirana's story is exactly that: how a city with such a history became, in thirty years, a place Western magazines describe as a rough diamond.

Tirana has only been the capital since 1920. Before that it was a small town with an Ottoman inheritance. Then Italian occupation, then Enver Hoxha's isolation, then the nineties. Every one of those layers is still visible if you walk, and the centre can be covered on foot without effort.

What others demolish, here they turned into a museum

The best thing about Tirana is how it handled its own past. Hoxha's concrete bunkers were neither torn down nor covered over with grass and silence - two of them have been converted into museums. Bunk'Art 2 tells the history of communism through the testimony of people who lived through it. The House of Leaves, the former secret police headquarters, is a museum of surveillance and repression across twenty years of dictatorship.

This is where a Balkan reader should stop. We are still arguing about whether to open the archives. There, they printed a ticket.

The pyramid from 1988, built in the dictator's honour, is now a cultural centre and arts school, renovated with European money. From the symbol of one man it became a building for children learning to code.

What you can see in two days

Skanderbeg Square with the equestrian monument to Gjergj Kastrioti, the National Opera and Ballet building and the mosaic on the History Museum. The Et'hem Bey Mosque, the city's oldest Islamic temple from the end of the eighteenth century, with a rare feature - floral frescoes, something Islamic decoration usually avoids. The Great Namazgah Mosque, among the largest in the Balkans, raised as an answer to the decades when faith was banned. The large park with a lake you can swim in and terraces along the water.

For food, Mullixhiu by chef Bledar Kola for contemporary Albanian cooking, Oda Garden and Shuci for traditional. Coffee at Radio Bar, Nouvelle Vague and Komiteti.

The best time is spring and early autumn - summer brings high temperatures and humidity. Dua Lipa, whose family has Albanian-Kosovar roots, received citizenship in November 2022 and has been the city's loudest ambassador since. But Tirana is not filling up because of her. It is filling up because it is cheaper than Italy, closer than Spain, and interested in showing what it has.