20 January 2009 | After four hurdle-filled years, the latest of which included villagers’ protests, construction work on the country’s first Club Med seaside resort began in Albania.


Villagers recently told international media that construction began on January 9 after several hundred policemen smashed through a roadblock, which the villagers had set up. They claimed that the developers did not have the right permit and that the court ruling on the dispute over the land’s ownership had not come out yet.

As BalkanTravellers.com reported last July, the complex, which is to contain 350 luxury villas and a capacity of 700 beds, is to be built in the Bay of Kakome, just across the Greek island of Corfu and 220 kilometres south-west of the capital, Tirana. Although the government approved the project in 2004, legal disputes over land ownership prevented its start.

The outcome of a court appeal is expected after a lower court said the land was not the villagers’, since they had bought it from the Ottoman Empire towards the end of the nineteenth century, and their claim was not valid because the Ottomans were occupiers.

Analysts say the disagreement is one of the many examples of confusion over property ownership in contemporary, post-communist Albania, where returning property to pre-communist owners is seen as dogged by corruption. This confusion presents one of the key impediments to economic progress.

The Club Med project's developers and the government, according to international media reports, hope that the multimillion euro project will put Albania, after nearly 40 years of isolation, on the mass tourism map.

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