Three shorelines that haven’t been ruined yet
The Mediterranean is not a single price bracket. Find the right part of it and you can still eat grilled fish at a table six feet from the water for fifteen euros, order a second carafe of local wine, and feel that the universe is, on balance, on your side.
There is a particular tyranny to the famous European coastline. The Amalfi coast is extraordinary, genuinely, incontestably — but the cost of a night there in July now requires a kind of financial decision-making that is incompatible with the relaxed mental state a holiday is supposed to produce. The Croatian islands have been beautiful for centuries, but Hvar has been discovered so thoroughly that it no longer quite belongs to the people who live there, or to the people who are visiting it for the first time, but to a kind of rolling international fraternity of people who have been before and who return to check that it’s still what they remembered.
None of this means the Mediterranean has given up. It means that the Mediterranean is large, and that some parts of it have not yet been absorbed into the apparatus of expensive familiarity. What follows is about those parts.
Albania
The Albanian Riviera — beautiful, slightly unfinished, and still itself
The Albanian coastline does not look like it should be this cheap. That is the first thing. You stand on the beach at Dhermi — white pebbles, water ranging from turquoise to a deep saturated blue that photographers have to tone down to be believed — and the arithmetic doesn’t add up. This should cost what Mykonos costs. It doesn’t. Not yet.
Albania’s Mediterranean coast runs for about 450 kilometres, and the southern section — the Riviera proper, from Vlorë down to Sarandë — is the part that’s been getting the attention. Ksamil, just north of the Greek border, has become genuinely busy in July and August: it appeared on enough Instagram feeds that the word got out in a way that word tends to get out now, rapidly and completely. But this is a small piece of a much larger coastline, and the instinct to write the whole thing off because Ksamil has a queue is a mistake.
Dhermi sits on a hillside above its beach, a village of white houses and outdoor bars and restaurants that stay open until the sea breeze makes a jacket necessary. The beach below is a twenty-minute walk down or a short taxi ride, and the water is cold enough in June to be genuinely refreshing rather than just wet. The restaurants along the shore serve grilled fish — fresh, local, simply cooked — for prices that make you want to order another plate just to confirm it wasn’t a mistake.
On the road. One of the pleasures of Albania is that the infrastructure has improved dramatically in recent years without the country having quite finished the process — which means that you can still, with a hire car and a degree of flexibility, drive between places that feel genuinely separate from each other. The road over the Llogara Pass, connecting the Riviera to Vlorë in the north, is one of the more dramatic drives in the Balkans: hairpin bends, pine forest, a view from the top that on a clear day extends to the Italian coast across the water. The journey takes about an hour and a half. It earns its reputation.
Beyond the coast, Albania keeps producing places that reward the detour. Berat — the “city of a thousand windows,” its Ottoman houses stacked up a hillside, their identical shuttered windows looking down over the river like eyes — is on the UNESCO list and deserves to be. Gjirokastër, birthplace of the writer Ismail Kadare, is built almost entirely from stone and has the particular quality of a city that has grown according to its own logic over centuries and arrived at something beautiful without having intended to. Neither place is crowded. Both places are inexpensive. A mid-range day in Albania — comfortable room, three meals, wine — runs to about fifty to fifty-five euros. This is not a rounding error.
You stand on the beach at Dhermi and the arithmetic doesn’t add up. This should cost what Mykonos costs. It doesn’t. Not yet.
Montenegro
Ulcinj, at the end of the coast where fewer people look
Montenegro’s problem, in a sense, is that it became fashionable too quickly in the wrong places. The Bay of Kotor is genuinely spectacular — mountains dropping straight into the water, a medieval walled town at the innermost point, the whole thing operating as a kind of geographical drama — and this is now broadly known, which means that in summer the bay is dotted with superyachts and the restaurants in Kotor’s old town have prices calibrated to the wallets of the people who arrive on them.
Budva, further south, has taken a different route to the same destination: it has become a nightlife destination of some notoriety, which has attracted investment, which has attracted prices. The beach clubs start early and go late, which is either what you want or definitively not what you want, with not much middle ground.
Ulcinj, at the country’s southern tip, is neither of these things. It is the centre of Albanian culture in Montenegro — the majority of the population here is ethnic Albanian, which gives the town a different character to everything above it on the coast: different food, different pace, different music drifting from the cafes. The old town is perched on a clifftop above the sea, and the view from the ramparts — particularly at dusk, when the light goes orange and the water goes dark — is as good as anything the Bay of Kotor offers and is observed by approximately a tenth as many people.
The beach at Velika Plaza stretches for twelve kilometres south of the town — one of the longest sandy beaches in the Adriatic — and it thins out considerably beyond the first kilometre or two. There are sections where you can put your things down and have something approaching privacy, which is a phrase that has become meaningful again after years of shoulder-to-shoulder July in more celebrated locations.
Café culture. Ulcinj's café scene operates on its own timetable, which is to say it operates slowly, without apology, and over multiple coffees. The Kino Cafe, in the old town, has the particular atmosphere of a place where the staff would be there whether or not customers arrived — genuinely indifferent to the tourism economy in a way that is, paradoxically, completely charming. Order a macchiato. Sit down. Watch the light move across the rooftops. Come back for another one. Nobody will hurry you.
The practical arithmetic: Montenegro is not as cheap as Albania or North Macedonia, but it remains considerably cheaper than Croatia, and the gap between what you spend and what you receive is wider than the comparable equation in Kotor. A decent room, meals, a day on the beach: sixty to seventy euros, comfortably. And the Adriatic here is the same Adriatic. The water is the same impossible blue.
Sicily
Sicily, which has always been itself and isn’t about to stop
Sicily is not an undiscovered destination and has no interest in being one. It is a large, ancient island — the largest in the Mediterranean — with a history that is essentially the history of the Mediterranean itself: Greek colonies, Carthaginian wars, Roman grain production, Arab gardens, Norman cathedrals, Spanish baroque, and then everything that happened in the twentieth century, which Sicily experienced in its own particular and complicated way.
What Sicily offers is something different: scale. It is big enough, and complicated enough, that it absorbs visitors without being changed by them in the way that smaller places are. Taormina fills up in summer and has been filling up since the Grand Tour — Goethe came, D.H. Lawrence stayed for a while and wrote about the lemon trees — but Taormina is not Sicily, any more than Piccadilly Circus is England. There are valleys in the interior where the towns have three thousand inhabitants and a Baroque church that would be famous if it were in Umbria, and where the price of lunch is fifteen euros and comes with a basket of bread and a half-litre of local wine and nobody who speaks English and a view of hills that look exactly as hills should look in September.
Siracusa is the place I would send someone who had never been and was wondering where to start. It is a city built on a small island — Ortigia — connected to the mainland by two short bridges, and the density of history per square metre is almost unreasonable. Caravaggio came here for a year after the murder in Rome that made him famous and painted some of his greatest work. The market on the mainland side sells swordfish and aubergines and blood oranges, depending on the season. The evening passeggiata — the ritual of walking up and down in one’s best clothes for the purpose of being seen and seeing others — is observed here with full seriousness, which is either an anachronism or proof of civilisation depending on how you look at it.
On value. Sicily's affordability depends enormously on where you go and when. August in Taormina is expensive, full stop. But Sicily in early June, or the second half of September, in a town that isn't on the resort circuit — this is a different proposition entirely. A four-star hotel in Siracusa's Ortigia in mid-June runs to €130–€150 a night. A meal at the market restaurant that's been there since before you were born: €18, with wine. The arithmetic holds. The trick, as with most of this, is timing and the willingness to be somewhere other than the obvious somewhere.
The Baroque towns of the Val di Noto — Noto, Ragusa Ibla, Modica — were rebuilt in the early 18th century after an earthquake destroyed everything, and were rebuilt all at once, which means they share a single style, honey-coloured limestone and exuberant ornament, in a way that unified building programs almost never achieve. They are some of the most beautiful townscapes in Italy. Fewer people visit them than visit Palermo or Taormina, and the prices in their restaurants reflect this fact with satisfying precision.
Sicily is big enough that it absorbs visitors without being changed by them. There are valleys in the interior where the towns are three thousand strong and the lunch is fifteen euros and comes with local wine and a view of hills that look exactly as hills should look.
The five destinations in these two pieces — Ohrid, Plovdiv, Wrocław, the Albanian Riviera, Ulcinj, Sicily — don’t form a system or a philosophy. They are just places where, right now, in summer 2026, the deal is still good: where what you pay and what you receive are in proportion, where the place still has enough of itself left to give you something you couldn’t have predicted. That combination — value, and the sense that a place is still genuinely itself — is not guaranteed anywhere. It’s worth pursuing wherever it exists.
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