Butrint

Butrint National Park was created in 2000 at the southern tip of Albania, opposite the Greek island of Corfu, and protects some 86 km² around the Butrint lagoon, the Vivari channel and the archaeological site of the same name.

Butrint was a Greek town, a Roman colony, a Byzantine episcopal seat and a Venetian stronghold, and its ruins preserve a Hellenistic theatre, an early Christian baptistery with mosaics, walls of several periods and a Venetian fortress, all amid a dense Mediterranean vegetation that has overgrown the whole and gives it its character. UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 1992 as a cultural property, and in 1997 placed it temporarily on the List of World Heritage in Danger because of looting and the lack of control during the Albanian institutional collapse of that year; it was removed from that list in 2005.

The natural setting is equally valuable: the Butrint lagoon, connected to the sea by the Vivari channel, is a highly productive brackish wetland with traditional mussel farming, ringed by Mediterranean woodland, marshes and meadows. It is a Ramsar site and a staging post for birds migrating between Europe and Africa, with wintering concentrations of wildfowl and waders, as well as otter and marine turtles in its waters.