Albania's Climate Zones

Three broad zones

• The coastal belt — Mediterranean: hot dry summers, mild wet winters. Durrës, Vlorë, Sarandë.
• The inland plains and valleys — more continental: hotter summers, colder winters. Elbasan, Berat, Fier.
• The highlands and Alps — cold, with heavy winter snow and a short summer. Korçë, Peshkopi, Theth, Valbonë.

Rainfall

Albania is one of the wetter countries in the Mediterranean. Rainfall is heavily concentrated in autumn and winter and falls off almost completely in July and August. The northern mountains are much wetter than the south-east — a fact that matters because almost all the country's electricity is hydroelectric.

The sea

Sea temperature lags air temperature by about a month, which is why September swimming is often better than June swimming even though the air is cooler. The Ionian in the south is warmer and clearer than the Adriatic in the north.

How climate shaped Albanian life

For centuries the rhythm of the year was set by transhumance: shepherds — Albanian and Aromanian (Vlach) alike — wintered their flocks on the mild coastal plains and drove them up to mountain pastures for the short summer. Highland villages emptied and filled with the seasons, and the old drove roads still cross the passes.

The plains themselves were long unhealthy. Their winter floods left marshes behind, and malaria made much of the Myzeqe and the coastal lowlands thinly settled until the 20th century, when drainage, land reclamation and anti-malaria campaigns, pushed hard by the communist government, turned them into the country's farmland.

Rain became a matter of national economics in the 1970s and 1980s, when the great dams on the Drin — Vau i Dejës, Fierza and Koman — were built. Since then a wet winter has meant electricity to spare and a dry one has meant imports and power cuts, which is why climate appears in Albanian economic news as often as in weather forecasts.

How this Atlas measures it

Every place page carries monthly normals computed from thirty years of ERA5 reanalysis (1994–2023) via Open-Meteo, rather than repeated from a brochure. That means Sarandë and Theth can be compared on the same basis, and every figure carries the same stated period.