Albania: Land, money and the sea

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1:30Wednesday the 21st of January 2026. It's a cool grey winter's day in the southern Albanian city of Velora when an unusual sight passes through the damp streets. A convoy of four by fours flanked by police. Hours earlier, Brian Negatora, who helps run his family's seaside resort, had received an urgent phone call from his father. It was actually quite surprising. I was in Tirana, to be honest, and my father called me, told me that Mrs Trump is going to come here, he's going to be here in a few hours. Immediately I said, OK, I'm on my way. The daughter of the President of the United States isn't alone.

2:14She's joined by Eddie Rama, Albania's Prime Minister of 14 years. She was quite simple, to be honest. I didn't expect it. Like, hello guys, thank you very much. I enjoyed it a lot. Did they have some raki? No, they didn't have that. As much as I know, only water. And also wine to toast it. So also they were toasting with some wine? Yes. Even before the visit in January, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, made headlines last year when it was announced they were planning a luxury tourist resort just off the Valora coast on the lush Cezanne island. a former Cold War military base abandoned to nature.

2:55It sits just across from the heel of the boot of Italy. Right now I'm working with my husband. We have this 1 ,400-acre island in the Mediterranean, and we're bringing in the best architects and the best brands. On our friend Nat Rothschild's boat, we got picked up in Montenegro, and then we started sailing over to Corfu, and we spent a couple days in Albania. One of the nights there, Prime Minister Rama came to the boat. I had not met him when I was in government. But I was very, very impressed with his vision for what he wanted to do with Albania. The Prime Minister famously declared Albania needs luxury tourism like a desert needs water.

3:35After their toast in the restaurant, Ivanka Trump and her entourage travel not to Sazan Island, but directly opposite it to the secluded Nata Lagoon in Zvenets, a protected natural area of special ecological importance, home to critically endangered monk seals, pale pink flamingos, sea turtles, rare birds and the odd sheep sunning itself on the beach. It's here Ivanka emerges with reportedly 100 architects and surveyors. Police set up corners and tents. It's shrouded in secrecy. Even locals from the nearby village aren't allowed near. He says that as long as I heard from the villagers She will take away the whole village I'm Emily Wither and for assignment on the documentary podcast we're taking a journey across Albania to discover how this Balkan country's communist past is still colliding with its present in battles over land, ownership and corruption and what the Prime Minister's vision for tourism could bring to the country and what it could take away.

4:54Around a three-hour drive from the capital, Tirana, lies the country's third-largest city, Vlora, Albania's answer to the French Riviera. Surprisingly, there's no train linking it to the capital, but a shiny new international airport is being built. Driving across the country, it's clear that it's a land of two parts. Ornate villas pepper the hillsides, and new apartment buildings are scattered amongst tired tower blocks, dilapidated agricultural buildings and half-built hotels. It's a beautiful country, but you quickly notice very different levels of wealth. Vlora itself boasts several beaches with stunning views out to sea and it's clear there are big plans to bring many more visitors here We're just walking across the beach you can probably hear the construction around me but then in between the hotels there are these tiny makeshift homes that people have built themselves clearly right on the coastline.

6:09And it's quite a juxtaposition to see these houses next to these tower blocks that are just appearing in between them. OK, this part, there was no houses at all. Only the boulevard and some neighbourhoods in the left and in the right. I'm talking about 35 years ago. So nothing from the buildings you can see there were buildings before. I'm walking on the beach with Irma al-Chukani, a lecturer at a local university. He grew up in Valora. We're here just one month after Ivanka visited. We're luckier with the weather, arriving in glorious sunshine. It was beautiful. a few small houses here, like people who used to fish, like houses of fishermen.

6:59And then nothing, like only sand. Somehow the sand was whiter and dry. Now it's always wet because of, I don't know, all these buildings they're making here, something has changed. Sounds idyllic, but Velora in the late 90s was one of the most dangerous places in the country. And one point, the state lost control of it to armed gangs. To understand why, we need to go further back. Albania emerged from the Second World War as a one-party communist state. During this time, no one was allowed in or out. All land became state-owned under a process known as collectivisation. Then, in 1990... Over 100 ,000 supporters of the Democratic Party are here, in the square, on the rooftops around me, and at their windows.

7:56They're waving flags, chanting and rejoicing in a democratic... The communist regime collapsed, but the celebrations were short-lived. In the centre of Vlora, Ghani Ibrahimi is clearing up broken glass and boarding up his small clothes the shop. It was looted in the recent violence. He says he's lost... I remember it was really poor. No much to do, a lot of disorder and probably not enough food. Like it was really poor in 1990s. In 1996, two thirds of Albanian citizens invested heavily in a series of pyramid schemes. People sold everything to buy into them. By the end of the year, almost half of the country's annual income had been swallowed up by those schemes.

8:42Then the companies that ran the schemes collapsed. All payments were defaulted. People lost everything. All this state, this corrupted state, this power has profited from this. And there are a lot of information that during the elections they've used money of this pyramidal scheme. The government refused to compensate people and Albania, particularly the south and Vlora, descended into chaos. We will not give our weapons until Salibarisha is going to be judged as a criminal. We have got our weapons just to be protected from Salibarisha. And we are ready to die until a hill is going to be down.

9:27And we are ready to fight with every army. On the day no one... I remember when it started. So we were in school and one day they said the school is closed. So they can't continue to do classes anymore. There was no possibility anymore to maintain order and anything. Everyone around here was having guns and so it was dangerous. So you could hear, especially in this part of the city, you could hear shooting every night. That sounds really frightening. Yeah, it was like really dangerous time.

10:06These days, Vlora feels like a relatively peaceful seaside city. People tell us there's hardly any petty crime here. But organised crime and corruption continues to plague the country. Living costs are high and the job market is tough. To me, all this construction is not a good idea. According to Istat, almost half of the buildings in Vlora are empty during the winter. OK, in summer, the city doubled, probably tripled in the number of the people living here. But I don't see it really well. We don't need it. While some of the locals we've been chatting to are sceptical, those in the tourism business, like Brian, who hosted Ivanka and the Prime Minister, look at this tangle of cranes and scaffolding and see only potential.

11:00It seems every month and every year something big is happening to us, which of course I think we deserve as well, because of tough history, tough times. So for us to be able to have something big here in our country, it's something that we've all dreamed for. Tourism, great tourism. Everyone is going to know Albania now in the next years. and we wait everyone with open arms, as we always do.

11:38A short drive from Valora, past pine forests and olive groves, lies the village of Svanets. It sits on a hilltop and as the road climbs higher, it becomes increasingly potholed and uneven. The village is striking, both in its beauty and in its emptiness. A few elderly locals sit on plastic chairs in the sun. They're in what serves as the village square, in front of a small market. Inside, the floor is half covered with water bottles. One man has already started on his raki, even though it's well before lunch. Bunting of the Albanian flag is strung up across the archways of the village's Greek Orthodox Church.

12:22But the tranquility and relative isolation of this village might soon be shattered. It's all to do with Ivanka Trump's visit to Nata Beach. Here's her husband, Jared Kushner, gushing about the area months earlier. We're really trying to design this in a way to be a place that we would want to be, a place that we would want to spend the summer. And as I tell different friends and I show them different renderings of what we're doing, they all say, oh, can we get a place there next to you? So I really think we'll build a tremendous community. The locals first heard that they had their eye on it when blueprints appeared online on the social media pages of Kushner and his business Affinity Global, largely funded by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.

13:07These plans baffled the locals. While Sazan Island is owned by the state, the land around this village that slopes steeply down to the Nata Lagoon before it meets the sea is both a protected area and private land. What's more, the land is subject to ongoing court cases. Locals have been locked in a land dispute here for 13 years. It's a nationwide issue that Vladimir Karai, a local journalist with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, has been tracking for 20 years. Property conflict is one of the biggest conflicts in the country. More than 10 years ago at least a third of the murders cases in albania were related to property conflicts and still there are cases at least one or twice a year every year cases of murder or or heavy crime that happens because of the conflicts of properties land disputes are one of the legacies of albania's complicated past each system of governance had different rules for who owned the land.

14:12Sometimes three people can lay claim to an area, and the tricky part is they can all be right. During the Albanian kingdom, before the World War II, the country was basically big land owners and villagers working for them, and that's it. After World War II, the communists came to power. All of this land was turned to state property because of collectivisation and cooperativisation of the country, so everything that was private was state-worned. In 91, when the dictatorship fell, they made a law which distributed the land to people living in the village. Basically, giving the land for them to use, but disregarding all deeds or everything else.

14:58So if you had a village with 500 acres of land and 500 villagers, each villager would get an acre of land. But here's the problem. The private landowners from before communism also have their own legal claim. From the beginning it created conflicts. Even inside small villages, from villages to villages, from house to house, people were saying that this was my father's land and you're taking it. It's not OK. When Rama came to power, he promised to resolve Albania's land crisis and return stolen property to the people who owned it. His government's efforts have so far seen little success. These conflicts are particularly fraught in areas where land is more valuable, especially where tourism projects are springing up, like Svanets and Vlora, prime seaside real estate.

15:48As we talk, we catch the attention of a man in his 70s called Thanas. He's sitting against the side of the supermarket. When he realises we're talking about the land disputes, he offers to take us up a steep hill to the highest point of the village.

16:06We've just come to the top of the village, where up here you get a bird's eye view of the whole area. There are rolling fields of olive groves where blueprints show they want to build villas. Right now there's barely anything on the land. And to the right of me there is a lagoon connected by a wooden bridge. Just past that is another stretch of hillside, pine trees, and then a long sandy beach, which then leads to the Adriatic Sea. And just over the water is Cezanne Island. It is so idyllic. He says that everything that you can see belongs to the village, and every part of the land is bordered with other lands, which means that every land has an owner and everyone knows everyone knows everyone and everyone knows that what land belongs to whom.

17:14One of the people the villagers are in a court battle with is a mysterious character. Everyone we spoke to knew of him but no one could tell you what he looked like. Even articles just have a blurry photo of him in sunglasses. The man, Arta Shehu, was one of the so-called strongmen of Vlora until he fled in 1997 after a gunfight at his uncle's bar. Since then, he's lived in Miami, Florida, from where he runs his Albanian construction company. What does he know about Arta Shehu? he says that should i tell about him that he is a land stealer he says that he took the land of his mother-in-law and then he lied to her because he told her that he already had the documents but he didn't and he took away the whole half of the village This is what the villagers, like Thanos, claim.

18:18Shehu denies any wrongdoing, but his lawyer was recently convicted of falsifying land documents. And Shehu himself is named as a person of interest in an international drugs trafficking case, as well as being investigated for links to the mafia. This drama seems so far removed from the quiet picture of traditional Mediterranean life.

18:45He says that in the village they are involved with fishing and also with olive oil producing. And he said that personally he produced 300 kilograms of olive oil. And his family uses it throughout the year and they even sell it.

19:07He says that she will get all that part over there from Sazan Island to... As long as I heard from the villagers. She will take away the whole village. It's likely that under different laws, all parties have a legal claim to the land, which seriously complicates things. because how can the government sell the land to investors if no one knows who owns it? And what does Albania risk losing if they build on such a wild and beautiful part of the world? This is the documentary from the BBC World Service.

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21:15We leave the village of Svonetsk and make our way through the protected area, down to the beach where Ivanka Trump and her architect stood a few weeks ago. You can only reach it by foot, bike or with a 4x4. Here the only other inhabitants are a flock of sheep sunbathing by the shore. It's the first time I've ever seen sheep on a beach. My father was fishing here. I used to swim here, so my whole child was here. I used to sleep in the monastery there, and all three months of summer we would come here every day to explore nature. Marina Shaw and Jamal Djeri are biologists with Pipanea, Albania's first independent non-profit environmental group.

22:04We join them on one of their excursions to monitor and record the wildlife in the area. And we walk every summer in these areas, in Viosa Delta and all across the side of the sand and the beach to monitor the sea turtles. And not only, also the monk seal, that it's Mediterranean monk seal, it's a highly important species. Until recently, building here would have been illegal. the area is protected because of its ecological importance but in June 2024 the government changed the rules and now a new airport is slowly taking shape nearby. So we just stood at the edge of a barbed wire fence next to what looks like is going to be a runway and you can see they've made some progress there's a watchtower there's what looks like a terminal but there's clearly a lot of construction work still going on.

23:00Was it expected that this would have been opened by now. Yeah, actually, every year the government promises that they will open this year and that year, but unfortunately they are not progressing to that, due to many reasons. Time to time, as you can see, this year it's flooded. It's flooded at the moment. I don't understand how you could build a runway on an area of land that is wet. Yeah, and over there there's a huge pool inside of the airport so can you imagine in heavy rain how this will be so just walking along the side of what's going to be the airport is a sheep herder and they're just coming past us right now

23:48it's slightly surreal that we're on the edge of an airport and there's just been a flock of sheep that's come past this is a farming area isn't it it's quite normal that to have livestock it's a part of the, one of the economics that these villages lived or based the family in. And these people that lived here, that based their future here, probably will, their landscape will shrink and shrink more and more. Pippinaya are currently locked in a long legal battle with the government over the airport. They're not against Valora having one or a tourism industry, But they say Nata Lagoon is a place of global significance for sea turtles, endangered monk seals and migratory bird species.

24:37Back in the lagoon, we stand on the wooden boardwalk that snakes across the water. Ahead of us is Venets Island, a monastery stands low against the tree line. Looking at the blueprints posted by Kushner, the hills are covered in villas. This area here, this pine tree forest, is a core zone area. I mean, in the sense that it's very important for wildlife. And then on the beaches and coming out of the coastline, I can see that they want to build a series of jetties with what looks to me like luxury yachts. I don't think this is very doable here because the lagoon itself is like maximum two metres depth of 1.5.

25:22So they need to do a lot of work, actually, and a lot of investment, which is crazy. I mean, looking at these renderings, they want to completely transform the area. It will be unrecognisable if they go ahead with this. Unfortunately, yes. We contacted Affinity Partners, Gerard Kushner's company, to request an interview, but didn't hear back. Why should people care about this outside of Albania? We're not talking here about birds of Albania. We're talking here about birds of world, birds of Europe, birds of Africa. We have here hundreds of species that come from Africa to Albania and hundreds that come from North Europe to Albania.

26:06Speaking to the locals, no one really knows for sure what's going on. And it's this lack of transparency that's brought with it allegations of corruption. There's been near-weekly protests in the capital, Tirana, this year, calling for Prime Minister Rama to root out corruption in his government and resign. What do you think those are? Molotov cocktails? They look like Molotov cocktails. The protesters are now just walking down from the police headquarters. They've been tear gassed, water canned. But now they're walking up to the parliament building and they are determined to keep protesting despite the heavy police presence.

26:57He said that we are here to protest today for our rights, for our well-being, and we want the government to leave, and because the government officials are stealing. What are they stealing from you? What are they stealing from you? Everything. The spirit of the people. He says that they are stealing everything, even the soul of the people. It's worth noting here, there's wide cross-party support for the Trump Kushner project, and there are no charges of corruption related to this development. But what's happening in Svanets looks a lot like the tensions around big development projects seen elsewhere in Albania.

27:39We were in contact with both the Prime Minister's office and the Ministry of Tourism. They appeared keen to do an interview, but we couldn't ever pin them down to a time. I feel really lucky that we've been able to come here and see such a pristine and beautiful part of unspoilt coastline because it feels like in the future this area could resemble parts of Greece, parts of Italy. And why shouldn't the government want to profit in the same way their neighbours have? We learnt about a well-known saying in Albania during our time here Iforte mes otaron The strong prevail The phrase is often used to describe situations where power, influence or force takes precedence over law, fairness or rights In other words, the powerful tend to get their way Can you understand why people would want to come and visit?

28:41I mean, I want to come back and bring my family and my friends. Yes, but I know for sure that everyone that wants to come here wants to come for this. Like, they miss this in their country. And I think people that are attracted to come here by car and to have luxury, they will miss everything because this will disappear.

29:05That's Sir Simon. I'm Emily Wither. The producer was Lizzie McNeill. the translator was Vajori Zinaruka. The programme was mixed by Neil Churchill, the production coordinator is Katie Morrison and the editor is Penny Murphy.

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