Travelling in Kosovo: a country whose high season is a homecoming

Why the arrivals are mostly people coming home

The Statistical Agency of Kosovo has published hotel occupancy quarterly since 2008, and the series it produces is small. Non-resident visitors recorded in hotels rose from 297,588 in 2022 to 357,717 in 2023, and the nights those visitors spent rose from 544,701 to 746,501 across the same year. That works out at a little over two nights each.

Set beside the airport, the hotel register is a rounding error. Four million passengers pass through a country of a million and a half, and hardly any of them are recorded as sleeping anywhere commercial, because they are sleeping in family houses. Kosovan emigration is old and concentrated. Remittances have run at about 14% of gross domestic product for a decade, most of them sent from Germany and Switzerland, and roughly a quarter of the businesses surveyed in 2009 had been founded with diaspora capital. The money sent home and the people who send it travel on the same calendar.

The origin list for foreign visitors is that same map read a second time. The bulk come from Albania, Germany, Italy, the United States, the United Kingdom, Croatia and Austria: one neighbour whose citizens cross on an identity card, and six countries where Kosovo Albanians settled.

What follows from this is seasonal, and it is the first thing to plan around. July and August are when cars on German, Swiss and Austrian plates fill the roads out of Pristina, when weddings are held because the family is in the country to attend them, when Prizren hands itself over to Dokufest, and when a bed booked late is hardest to find. Late May, June and September are the months in which the same country has rooms, empty trails and restaurants working at an ordinary pace.

What the seasons do here

Kosovo lies between the Adriatic and the continental interior and takes weather from both, which produces a wide annual range rather than a mild one. Summer highs reach 30 °C over most of the country and winter lows sit around −10 °C, but the two plains do not behave alike and the mountains behave like neither.

The Ibar valley in the north and east is the continental half. Its winters run colder, with means below −10 °C in the hardest spells and recorded lows to −26 °C, while summers average about 20 °C and reach 37 °C. It is also the dry half, taking roughly 600 mm of precipitation a year. The Dukagjin plain in the west, drained by the White Drin, pulls warm air off the Adriatic up the river valleys; its winter means sit nearer 0.5 °C, it takes about 700 mm a year, and when snow does come it comes heavily.

Above the plains the arithmetic changes again. The forested mountain belt takes 900 to 1,300 millimetres a year, its summers are short and cold, and snow lies long into the spring. That is what compresses the high walking season in the western ranges into roughly late June to early October, and it is why almost nothing worth doing above the treeline is available in April.

What the two national parks protect

Kosovo has two national parks and they sit on opposite mountain frontiers, each of them shared with a different neighbour.

Bjeshkët e Nemuna National Park covers 63,028 hectares of the Albanian Alps in the districts of Peja and Gjakova, along the western and southwestern borders with Montenegro and Albania. The range is steep, forested and roadless over long stretches, and the Albanian name, rendered in English as the Accursed Mountains, is a good deal older than the park. Gjeravica stands inside it at 2,656 m, the highest ground in the country, with glacial lakes at Leqinat, Zemra and Gjeravica itself.

Sharr Mountains National Park covers 53,272 hectares along the southeastern border with North Macedonia. It was declared in 1986 under Yugoslav administration and re-established under Kosovan law in 2012. Glacial lakes, summer pasture and periglacial ground make up most of its surface.

Both parks hold animals that have thinned out across southern Europe. Brown bear, grey wolf, lynx and golden eagle are all resident, and the reason is much the same as the reason the roads are poor.

Why the high routes cross three borders

The trekking route through western Kosovo does not stay in Kosovo. The Peaks of the Balkans trail is a loop of about 192 kilometres through one massif divided between Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro, and its Kosovan section runs through the Rugova highlands above Peja. The crossings are mountain passes with no border post on them, so a walker applies in advance to the police of each country whose frontier the route cuts, and the permission is checked by patrols rather than at a gate. Day walking out of Peja and back needs none of that. Anything that goes over a ridge into Montenegro or Albania does, and the applications take weeks rather than days.

Where the water is worth a detour

The waterfall on the White Drin north of Peja, and the Bukuroshja e Fjetur cave beside it, take more visitors than anything else in the west. The Mirusha waterfalls in the Dukagjin plain are a chain of pools stepped down through a limestone gorge. Rugova canyon carries the road up from Peja into the park and is the only easy way to see that terrain from a car.

The lakes are mostly reservoirs and their volumes explain what each is used for: Gazivoda holds 380 million cubic metres in the northwest, Radoniq 113 million in the southwest, Batllava 40 million and Badovc 26 million in the northeast. Batllava is the one that carries swimming, camping and small boats, being close enough to Pristina for an afternoon.

How the ski resort sits between two airports

Brezovica lies on the Kosovan flank of the Sharr Mountains, 60 km from Pristina International Airport and 70 km from Skopje, so the airport nearest to it is in another country. It was built as a Yugoslav winter resort and it remains the one place in Kosovo where the commercial season is winter rather than summer, working on skiing and snowboarding while the passes are shut.

Out of season the resort keeps running on walking, mountain biking and golf, which is a modest business built on the same lifts and the same beds. The wider point for anyone planning a route is that Brezovica and the Sharr sit at the opposite end of the country from Peja and the Accursed Mountains, and the two ranges are a full traverse apart.

What each of the old towns holds

Prizren is the town most visitors are sent to first, and it earns that on fabric rather than on any single building: an Ottoman quarter that survived largely intact, a stone bridge over the Lumbardhi i Prizrenit, the fortress on the hill above with Roman foundations under it, the Sinan Pasha Mosque of 1615 in the middle of the town, and Our Lady of Ljeviš a short walk from it.

Peja sits on its own river at the mouth of the Rugova canyon and is the base for the western mountains. Its old market still works as a market, with tailors, goldsmiths and leather tanners in the same lanes, and the Bajrakli mosque and the Patriarchate of Peć are both within reach on foot or a short drive.

Gjakova has the longest of the surviving bazaars and the bridges that go with it, and it keeps a nightlife out of proportion to its size because the university towns are elsewhere. Pristina is the arrival point rather than the attraction: the Kosovo Museum, the Ethnological Museum, the clock tower, the Imperial Mosque of 1461, Ibrahim Rugova's grave, and Gërmia park on the edge of the city where the capital goes at weekends.

Two more are worth the drive for a specific reason. Novo Brdo was a medieval mining town and what is left of its castle stands on a ridge with walking and mountain-biking ground around it. Ulpiana, near Pristina, was a Dardanian and then Roman city of the 2nd century, rebuilt under Justinian I, and it is an excavation rather than a monument.

Why the medieval monasteries are under guard

Four Serbian Orthodox buildings are inscribed by UNESCO under the name Medieval Monuments in Kosovo. Visoki Dečani, built between 1327 and 1335, was listed alone in 2004, and the Patriarchate of Peć, Gračanica and Our Lady of Ljeviš were added in 2006 as a serial extension. The Patriarchate is a complex of four churches raised between 1230 and 1330 and has been the seat of the Serbian Patriarchate since 1302. Gračanica was completed in 1321 under King Milutin. The citation describes the group as a fusion of Byzantine and Romanesque church building into the Palaiologan style.

The property was placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2006, on grounds of the difficulty of managing and conserving it. Several of the monuments were attacked during the ethnic violence of March 2004, Our Lady of Ljeviš among them, and Visoki Dečani has been guarded by the NATO-led Kosovo Force since 1999. The Serbian Orthodox Church holds these as working monasteries of great importance to Serbs; Kosovan heritage law lists them as protected monuments of the Republic. Both statements are on the record and neither cancels the other.

For a visitor the practical shape of this is simple. Passports are presented at the gate, the dress code is a monastery's, photography is limited inside, and opening times are set by a monastic community rather than by a ticket office, which means arriving in the middle of the day rather than at either end of it.

Why an itinerary through Serbia needs planning

Serbia treats Kosovo as part of its own territory, so the crossings between the two are not international borders in Serbian law and Serbian officers apply neither entry nor exit stamps at them. Serbia likewise does not recognise the entry points between Kosovo and third countries, Pristina airport included, because they are not under Serbian control.

The effect on a traveller is mechanical. Somebody who flies into Pristina, or who enters overland from Albania, Montenegro or North Macedonia, then tries to cross north into Serbia, is carrying a passport that shows no Serbian entry, and travellers in that position have been refused at the crossing for exactly that reason. Entering Serbia from North Macedonia instead avoids it, as does entering Kosovo from Serbia and leaving the same way.

Entry to Kosovo itself is lighter. Citizens of Albania, Montenegro and Serbia may cross on a national identity card with no stamping involved, and citizens of European Union states, North Macedonia, Monaco and San Marino may use a biometric identity card, although not every European Union state issues one that qualifies. The currency is the euro, taken up when the German mark went out of circulation and held without a seat in the institution that prints it, so nobody arriving from the euro area exchanges anything. The dialling code is +383, assigned in 2016, and mobile coverage close to the northern and southern frontiers hands a phone back and forth between Kosovan and neighbouring networks.

How the roads and the railway run

Two motorways carry most of the movement. The R7 runs southwest from Pristina towards Albania and forms the Kosovan half of the road to the Adriatic at Durrës, which is how a landlocked country reaches a port. The R6 runs southeast from Pristina to the North Macedonian border at Hani i Elezit, about 20 km short of Skopje; it was begun in 2014 and completed in 2019. Work on the R7.1 started in 2017. The unbuilt piece is the European route from Pristina to Merdare on the Serbian frontier, which would join the network to the corridor through Niš.

Rail is thin and useful in two directions. Trainkos runs daily passenger trains from Pristina through Fushë Kosovë to Peja, and from Pristina through Fushë Kosovë and Ferizaj to Skopje, the second jointly with Macedonian Railways. The Peja line is the useful one for the western mountains, and the rest of the network carries freight.

Pristina International Airport is the only port of entry by air, which is why its passenger figure stands in for national arrivals in the way it does. Gjakova Airport was built by the Kosovo Force after the war beside an existing agricultural airstrip and has been used for military and humanitarian flying; the stated plan is to let it as a civil airport under a public-private partnership. Away from the two motorways and the two rail lines, movement is by bus or by car, and the state of the roads up into Rugova and the Sharr is a large part of why those two parks stay as empty as they are.