On summer weekends it seems the whole city smacks on sunscreen and flops on the wide sandy beach at Velipoja, 34km west of Shkodra. Just 15 years ago, this was a very simple fishing village with a handful of houses, connected to Shkodra by an awful road. Now, you're in for a surprise, as hundreds of mostly illegal constructions have popped out of the ground, with some hotel balconies just a metre or two from the next hotel wall. The road is now good, making a left turn at the entrance of the village and following the coast south. Furgons zip up and down to Shkodra all day for about 100 lek.

The beach and its facilities, frankly, are a mess. There's little central planning, no paved roads apart from the main road, haphazard parking, ad hoc kiosks everywhere, no effective trash collection; foreign donors work with local business owners to tackle the rubbish problem. Unless you don't mind a bit of anarchy, you're advised to stay away from the central beach area, but head a few more kilometres down to the road to find pleasant deserted stretches of beach backed by forests.

The hotels and apartments in Velipoja are chock-full of Albanian, Macedonian and Kosovar tourists in summer, who usually block-book rooms for weeks on end, and there's little chance of finding a room for just a few nights in high season.