They were built not just in their hundreds, or even several thousand – a conservative estimate puts the number of completed bunkers at more than 170,000. From the northern border with Montenegro to the beaches facing the Greek island of Corfu, Albania was covered with bunkers in a frenzy of paranoid construction. The bunkers gazing out across the Bay of Vlore are the tip of a concrete-and-steel iceberg. Convinced that everyone from neighbouring Yugoslavia to Greece, Nato and even his former allies in the Soviet Union wanted to invade his country, Hoxha embarked on a bunker-building programme of titanic proportions. The bunkers were the brainchild of Enver Hoxha, a former partisan who ruled post-war Albania for 40 years under a regime both brutal and surreal. How the Cold War Vulcan bomber flew again.The nuclear bunker in ‘Europe’s North Korea’.They have been here since the 1970s, when Albania was one of the most isolated countries on Earth. The walls are crowned with a rounded cupola. They are squat and grey, just tall and wide enough to fit a pair of people in each. My guide, Elton Caushi, jokes that we are ignoring a 2,000-year-old ruin in favour of a 40-year-old one.īetween the ruins of the naval barracks and the road are a handful of bunkers.

It was once the barracks for the nearby Pasha Liman naval base, which can be seen on the other side of the causeway road. There is another ruin at the foot of Orikum’s crumbling structures, though this one is less than half a century old, and far less celebrated. It is a remarkably well-preserved memory of the Roman occupation, complete with a theatre that still retains many of its stone steps. I am scrambling across the ruins of Orikum, a Roman-era settlement that lies at the southern end of the sweeping Bay of Vlore, on Albania’s Adriatic coast. It is a spring morning and the sun is already high and hot.

Weight room ked bay fallout shelter