Abandoned Places in Vlorë

Military storage tunnels on a hillside, their concrete blast doors still standing — sheltered among peaceful olive groves with open access.

A former hilltop air defense position within a nature reserve, quietly reclaimed by the landscape — concrete gun platforms, semi-subterranean rooms, and open prefabricated tunnels still survive.

Several communist-era ammunition storage tunnels cut into a hillside near a former cement factory — one horseshoe-shaped and waist-deep in water, another unfinished and dripping with mineral seeps. Free entry if you don't mind getting wet.

A communist-era brick factory in Vlora whose bricks went into nearly every five-storey block in the city — seasonally waterlogged, fenced off, and grazed by sheep.

A former government residence on the Albanian Riviera, frozen in time — with original furniture, carpets, and a rooftop veranda overlooking Saranda.

A sizeable dying village in southern Albania with centuries of history — perched on a high coastal hill, roughly 80% of its old houses stand abandoned, some reduced to rubble, others eerily intact.

Six monolithic concrete gun shelters on the cliffs of a peninsula near Vlorë — four facing the open sea, two covering the bay — with gunners' slogans and charts still on the walls.

A small modern ceramic factory that once produced colourful facing bricks — shut down over a property dispute and promptly stripped of all its wiring by more entrepreneurial visitors.

A three-storey former dormitory of a trade school, partially embedded in a hillside, with common rooms, residential floors, and scenic balconies — left to decay mid-renovation.

A typical Albanian air defense position made atypical by its unusually long underground staircase and partially above-ground concrete posterns — abandoned so long that trees have grown to the width of a human body.

A large hilltop air defense position spread across two hills inside a nature reserve, connected by concrete-roofed trenches and linked by a crooked staircase to a bunker below.

A modern brick factory built around 2007 that never opened — probably a casualty of the 2008 crisis. Under one 100-metre roof: Italian mixing and moulding equipment, vast drying chambers and a tunnel kiln, all intact.

A rare type of artillery position — monolithic concrete gun emplacements with stepped canopies, connected by tunnels running through the hill, and dramatically overgrown with agave and cacti.

Beneath a hill crowned by a fortress and lighthouse lies an extensive network of tunnels and bunkers — four gun emplacements, a rangefinder post, and hundreds of metres of underground passages looking out toward Corfu.

A graveyard of police-impounded cars in Vlora.

A large command-type bunker carved into the rock of an urban hill — three entrances, a maze of corridors, and a diesel room that now survives only as a concrete slab.

A standard coastal artillery position on the Albanian Riviera — four open bunkers built from prefabricated concrete elements, designed to shelter heavy guns overlooking the sea.

A small village scattered across the hills near Vlorë — around ten houses in varying states of decay, some half-collapsed, others still almost liveable.

A small fuel storage facility that once served a nearby military base — featuring a large surface tank, transfer pipes, and a tunnel cut into the rock hiding horizontal barrels behind a blast door.

A coastal storage tunnel with a mooring pier for boats, featuring a massive concrete door and a striking view from outside.

A standard coastal artillery position featuring four bunkers built from prefabricated concrete elements, with a rangefinder post just above — its walls still bearing instructional charts for the gunners.

A massive five-storey textile factory on the main artery of the city — still strewn with cutting tables, bolts of fabric, mannequins, counterfeit brand labels, and socialist-era safety notices quoting Enver Hoxha.

An abandoned coastal artillery battery with four gun emplacements, a rangefinder tower, and sweeping sea views — now hemmed in by resort construction on all sides.

An underground complex near the Pashaliman naval base, once housing an ammunition depot, a machine workshop, and a three-generator diesel power station. Today the site is stripped bare — though Communist slogans still line the workshop walls.