The scientists who built the case for the Vjosa came back to the delta today, and what they foun (3)

JUN 21 2026 · 12:03

The scientists who built the case for the Vjosa came back to the delta today, and what they found shocked them. Some of them have studied this river for ten years. Their work is the reason Albania declared the Vjosa a Wild River National Park in 2023. This morning they walked in past the pumping station gates beside the Narta lagoon, onto ground they have surveyed season after season, and met it cut through with excavator tracks. Edi Rama says these projects will not harm nature. He says luxury tourism will protect this coast and leave it better than before. The scientists who walked the delta today call that a fiction. From the gates onward they could see the erasure underway: dunes broken open, the living edge of the lagoon scraped down to sand. The government drew the park boundary at the river and left the delta outside it. Now they are coming for the whole delta. This was never only the Kushner resort. Plans have surfaced for luxury hotels, golf courses and marinas on both sides of the Vjosa mouth: a 639-hectare resort to the south, a 600-hectare resort to the north. The developer’s own plan calls this floodplain one of the most magnificent river ecosystems in the Balkans, then draws a golf course through its lagoons By evening they had put their names to one statement for the Albanian Government. Cancel the destructive projects in the delta. Bring the delta inside the Vjosa Wild River National Park. Build a nature-friendly eco-tourism worthy of a place they call without par in the whole Mediterranean basin. No one knows this landscape better. They are asking the government to listen. 📷 @joshua.d.lim