Theth

Theth National Park was created in 1966 in northern Albania, in the Albanian Alps, or Prokletije, and protects some 26 km² around the valley of the same name, set between limestone walls rising above two thousand metres.

The valley is glacial in origin, with steep slopes, waterfalls such as Grunas, gorges and the so-called Blue Eye of Theth, a karst spring of turquoise water. The vegetation combines beech woods, black pine stands and high-altitude pastures, and the massif is home to Balkan chamois, brown bear and one of the world's most fragile populations of Balkan lynx, of which a few dozen animals remain split between Albania and North Macedonia.

The village of Theth preserves a notable traditional architecture of stone and wood, with the nineteenth-century Catholic church and, above all, the kulla e ngujimit, the lock-in tower: a defensive building where men condemned under the blood feud according to the Kanun, the Albanian customary code, shut themselves away to avoid being killed. It is one of the few that survive and bears witness to a social institution that persisted into the twentieth century. The isolation of the valley, reachable only over a mountain pass for much of the year, has preserved both the landscape and that culture.