https://guidetoalbania.com/Recent content on Guide to AlbaniaHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usSun, 06 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/shkoder-guide/Sun, 06 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/shkoder-guide/Most people see Shkodër at a quarter to seven in the morning, from the window of a minibus that is about to leave for the Koman ferry. They arrived the night before, slept a few hours in the cheapest bed in the north, and by the time the sun is properly up they are on a boat through the Drin canyon telling each other that Shkodër seemed nice. It did seem nice.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/gjirokaster-guide/Wed, 02 Sep 2026 14:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/gjirokaster-guide/Gjirokastër is built of one material, and it announces the fact from across the valley. Grey limestone walls, grey slate roofs laid in overlapping scales, grey cobbles polished by four centuries of feet, all of it climbing a mountainside so steep that the houses had to become towers to stand on it. The Albanians call it Qyteti i Gurtë, the Stone City, and for once the nickname is a plain description.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/korce-guide/Wed, 02 Sep 2026 13:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/korce-guide/Korçë is the city I would send you to if you told me you wanted to see how Albanians live when nobody is performing for tourists. It sits at 850 metres on a plain in the south-east, an hour from Greece and an hour from Lake Ohrid, and for most of the last century it has been the country’s quiet cultural capital: the first Albanian-language school, the first brewery, the oldest serenades, and the evening walk that the rest of the country measures its own against.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/dhermi-and-himara-guide/Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/dhermi-and-himara-guide/Dhërmi and Himara are twenty-five minutes apart on the same road, they share the same sea, and people write to me every summer asking which one to book. The honest answer is that they are two different holidays that happen to be neighbours. Dhërmi is a stone village stacked two hundred metres up the flank of the Ceraunian mountains, with its beach a steep half hour below it and the loudest beach clubs in Albania strung along the water.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albania-summer-music-festivals/Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albania-summer-music-festivals/For fifty weeks of the year Dhërmi is a village of about 1,800 people, stacked up the flank of the Ceraunian mountains, with a stone church at the top and a pebble beach a long walk below. For the other two, in early June, it holds one of the more talked-about electronic music festivals in Europe, and the road down to the water fills with minibuses of people who flew into Tirana that morning and have never been to Albania before.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albania-evening-promenades/Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albania-evening-promenades/Every Albanian city keeps one street for the evening. Not always the widest street, and not always the prettiest, but the one where, as the day’s heat breaks, the whole town comes out to walk slowly up and down until dark. I have already written about what the xhiro is and why it survives, the nightly ritual that outlived dictatorship, the arrival of cars, and the smartphone. This is the practical companion: the actual boulevards, where they run, when they fill, and what to eat while you walk.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/renting-a-car-in-albania/Thu, 27 Aug 2026 13:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/renting-a-car-in-albania/A rental car is the right decision in Albania more often than it is the wrong one. The country is small, the good parts are scattered, and the places that reward you most are exactly the places public transport reaches worst. You can see a great deal of Albania without one. You cannot see it on your own terms. But this is also the country where I have watched more visitors lose money and temper at a rental desk than anywhere else I know, and where the driving itself is genuinely the most dangerous thing most travellers will do here.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/is-albania-safe/Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/is-albania-safe/I get asked this more than any other question, usually in a slightly apologetic tone, as though the person is embarrassed to be asking. Someone has told them Albania is dangerous. They cannot remember who, or why, but the impression is there and they would like it either confirmed or removed. So here is the honest version, with the numbers attached. Albania is a safe country to travel in. It is safer than its reputation by a wide margin, and by the ordinary measures of violent crime it is safer than several countries you would not think twice about visiting.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/hiking-near-tirana-day-hikes/Thu, 27 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/hiking-near-tirana-day-hikes/Tirana sits in a bowl. Stand anywhere on the boulevard, look east past the ministries, and there is a grey-green wall of mountain closing off the sky. Most visitors spend three days in this city, photograph the painted buildings, drink a great deal of coffee, and never once walk up into it. That is a shame, because the hiking within an hour of Tirana is genuinely good. Not Alps good. You will not get the Valbona pass or the Accursed Mountains here.https://guidetoalbania.com/affiliate-disclosure/Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/affiliate-disclosure/Running this site costs money, and I would rather not cover that with banner ads. So some of the booking links you find in my guides are affiliate links. Here is what that means in practice. When I recommend a practical service, renting a car for the coastal road, a fixed-price transfer to a trailhead, an eSIM so you have signal when the furgon drops you somewhere unexpected, travel insurance for the mountains, the link sometimes goes through a partner platform.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/raki-trail-skrapar-permet/Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/raki-trail-skrapar-permet/Ask any Albanian where the best raki comes from and you will start an argument that outlasts the bottle. But when the argument finally settles, usually two names are left standing. Skrapar, whose grape raki is the bottle you bring when you want to show respect. And Përmet, where the mulberries that grow along the Vjosa turn into raki mani, the softest and most fragrant spirit this country makes. I wrote a full guide to what raki is and how to drink it.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/solo-female-travel-albania/Thu, 20 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/solo-female-travel-albania/Albania has a reputation problem with women travellers that has very little to do with Albania and quite a lot to do with what people half-remember about the Balkans in the 1990s. The short version, and then the long one: solo women travel here in large numbers, most report feeling safe, violent crime against visitors is genuinely rare, and the country ranks around 36th of 148 on the global gender gap index, which puts it ahead of several places nobody hesitates about.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/berat-guide/Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/berat-guide/Berat’s nickname is the city of a thousand windows, and like most nicknames it is doing something more interesting than describing a view. The white Ottoman houses stacked up the Mangalem hillside are arranged so that no house blocks the light of the one behind it. Every roof is set below the windows above. That is not an aesthetic accident, it is a rule, enforced by an 18th and 19th century town that had decided nobody’s neighbour was entitled to their sunlight.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/blue-eye-syri-i-kalter/Sat, 08 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/blue-eye-syri-i-kalter/Half of what is written online about the Blue Eye is out of date, and the half that matters most is the half about swimming. You cannot swim in it any more. Not “officially discouraged”, not “at your own risk”. There are wardens, they enforce it, and the enormous number of photographs of people leaping into that impossible blue circle are all from before the rule came in. If jumping in was the reason you were going, adjust your expectations before you drive an hour to find out.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/day-trips-from-tirana/Sun, 02 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/day-trips-from-tirana/Tirana is a good city, and two days is about right for it. The problem is that most people give it three or four because they have flights either side, and then spend the extra time looking for something to do in a capital they have already walked. The answer is that Tirana sits in the middle of the country’s narrow waist, and almost everything worth seeing in central Albania is inside ninety minutes of it.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/where-to-stay-in-albania/Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/where-to-stay-in-albania/Choosing where to sleep in Albania is a bigger decision than in most countries, because the distances are short but the roads are slow, and because the difference between two towns forty minutes apart can be the difference between a holiday you loved and one you tolerated. Sarandë and Himarë are both on the Riviera. They are not remotely the same trip. Blloku and the Grand Park are both central Tirana.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/driving-in-albania/Tue, 21 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/driving-in-albania/Driving is the single most dangerous thing most visitors will do in Albania. That is not a scare line, it is arithmetic: the country’s road death rate runs around 10.8 per 100,000 people against a homicide rate of 1.4, which makes the road roughly eight times more likely to kill you than a person will. I have laid that argument out in full in the piece on whether Albania is safe.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albania-itinerary-7-10-14-days/Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albania-itinerary-7-10-14-days/The most common mistake in Albanian trip planning is not choosing the wrong places. It is choosing the right places and giving them the wrong amount of time. Albania is small. Three hundred and forty kilometres from the Montenegrin border to the Greek one. On a map it looks like a country you could see in five days. In practice, the road from Gjirokastër to Sarandë climbs a mountain, the road along the Riviera is one lane of hairpins behind a truck, and Google’s estimate of two hours means three with a coffee and a flock of sheep.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albania-travel-cost-budget/Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albania-travel-cost-budget/Most of what you will read about the cost of Albania was written between 2018 and 2022, and it is wrong now. Not because Albanian prices exploded, though tourist-facing ones have certainly climbed, but because of something quieter that almost nobody writing about the country has accounted for. The lek got strong. A decade ago a euro bought you around 140 lekë, and as recently as 2021 it still bought more than 120.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albania-sim-card-esim/Sat, 04 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albania-sim-card-esim/Here is the single most expensive misunderstanding in Albanian travel, and it has nothing to do with taxis or restaurants. Albania is not in the EU roaming zone. Your phone does not know that. It will connect to Vodafone Albania or One Albania the moment you cross the border from Greece or step off the ferry from Italy, and it will keep doing everything it did yesterday, at rates that can run into euros per megabyte depending on your provider.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/tirana-airport-transport/Mon, 29 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/tirana-airport-transport/Almost everyone who comes to Albania arrives at the same place. Tirana International Airport, still called Rinas by everyone who lives here, after the village it sits next to. It handles the overwhelming majority of the country’s air traffic, and for most visitors the seventeen kilometres between its doors and central Tirana are the first piece of Albanian logistics they have to solve. It is not a difficult problem. But it is one where the difference between the cheapest and the most expensive answer is roughly tenfold, and where a surprising number of people pay the top price without knowing the others exist.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/valbona-to-theth-hike/Mon, 18 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/valbona-to-theth-hike/There is a moment on this hike, maybe three hours up from the Valbona side, when the trail finally stops climbing. You come over a lip of rock, the wind changes, and a second valley opens up below you. It is green and deep and looks nothing like the one you left after breakfast. That saddle is Qafa e Valbonës, the Valbona pass, and it is the whole reason people come.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/burrnesha-albanian-sworn-virgins/Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:31:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/burrnesha-albanian-sworn-virgins/In the stone villages of Albania’s northern highlands, a small number of elderly people are the last living remnants of a tradition that has almost no parallel anywhere else in Europe. They were assigned female at birth. They swore an oath, in front of twelve village elders, to live the rest of their lives as men. Once the oath was spoken, it could not be taken back. They are called burrnesha, from the Albanian word burrë (man).https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/hiking-in-albania-first-timers-guide/Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:13:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/hiking-in-albania-first-timers-guide/Albania is one of the best hiking countries in Europe that almost nobody outside the Balkans has figured out yet. The mountains are genuinely wild, the trails are uncrowded even in August, and a week of hiking here still costs less than a weekend in the Dolomites. If you have done your alpine hiking in Austria, Switzerland, or northern Italy, you are going to find Albania rougher, quieter, and in places more beautiful than anything you have walked through before.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/how-tirana-got-its-colors/Mon, 20 Apr 2026 12:53:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/how-tirana-got-its-colors/If you walk west from Skanderbeg Square along the river Lana, you will start to notice the walls. An apartment block in deep orange. Another in lemon yellow. One striped like a circus tent, another dotted like wrapping paper. Geometric patterns on 1970s facades, rainbow stripes at Wilson Square. Tirana has more painted concrete than any other capital in Europe, and almost no visitor arrives knowing why. The short version is that in the year 2000, a painter became mayor and started coloring the city.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albanian-agroturizem-farm-to-table/Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albanian-agroturizem-farm-to-table/The first time I ate at Mrizi i Zanave, I did not look at a menu because there is no menu. A young woman, Altin Prenga’s niece I think, came to our table with a small notebook and asked what we did not eat. That was the only question. Allergies, dislikes, religious restrictions, she wrote it all down. An hour later, food started arriving and did not stop for three hours.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albanian-raki-guide-how-its-made/Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albanian-raki-guide-how-its-made/The first raki I ever drank, I did not drink on purpose. I was seven years old in my grandfather’s courtyard in a village outside Berat, and I thought the little glass on the low table held water. It was October, the grape harvest was just behind us, and the whole village smelled like slowly burning wood and crushed fruit. I took a sip, my eyes watered, and my grandfather laughed so hard he had to sit down.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/koman-lake-ferry-albania/Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/koman-lake-ferry-albania/The engine cut out somewhere in the middle of the canyon, and for about thirty seconds the only sound was water lapping against the hull. Everyone on the upper deck went quiet. The cliffs rose straight up on both sides, grey limestone streaked with green where shrubs had found a crack to grip. The water below was so still it doubled everything, sky and stone and the thin white line of a waterfall dropping from somewhere above.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/butrint-3000-years-of-history/Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/butrint-3000-years-of-history/The sound that stays with me from Butrint is not what you would expect. Not a guide’s voice or the click of cameras. It is the silence. I walked through the Lion Gate on an October morning with fog still hanging over the Vivari Channel, and the only sound was water dripping from oak branches onto two-thousand-year-old stone. For a moment I forgot what century I was in. Butrint (Butrinti in Albanian) sits on a small peninsula at the southern tip of Albania, surrounded by a lake, a channel, and dense forest.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albanian-gliko-fruit-preserves-in-syrup/Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albanian-gliko-fruit-preserves-in-syrup/The first time I tasted gliko arrë, walnut preserve, I was eleven years old, sitting in my great-aunt Donika’s kitchen in Përmet. She placed a small glass plate in front of me with a single spoon resting across it. On the spoon sat a whole green walnut, dark as mahogany, glistening in thick syrup. Next to it, a glass of cold water so clear it caught the afternoon light. “Haje ngadalë,” she said.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albania-750000-bunkers/Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albania-750000-bunkers/The first bunker I ever noticed was on a beach near Durrës. I was maybe six years old, building a sandcastle with my cousin, and there it was: a concrete dome the size of a small car, half-buried in the sand, its gun slit staring out at the Adriatic like a single unblinking eye. I asked my father what it was. He said it was a bunker. I asked what it was for.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/understanding-besa-albanian-code-of-honor/Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/understanding-besa-albanian-code-of-honor/A few years ago, I was driving through the mountains near Theth with a friend from London. We had a flat tire on a gravel road with no cell signal and no spare that fit. Within ten minutes, a man appeared from a stone farmhouse we had not even noticed. He did not ask what happened. He walked to the car, looked at the tire, and waved for us to follow him inside.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/xhiro-the-albanian-evening-walk/Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/xhiro-the-albanian-evening-walk/I did not understand xhiro until I stopped trying to understand it. My first summer back in Albania after years in Italy, I was staying with family in Korçë. Around seven in the evening, my aunt stood up from the couch, smoothed her hair, and said, “Hajde, do dalim për xhiro.” Let’s go out for xhiro. I asked where we were going. She looked at me like I had asked something very strange.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/tave-kosi-albanias-national-dish/Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/tave-kosi-albanias-national-dish/The first time I truly understood tavë kosi, I was not in a restaurant. I was standing in my gjyshe’s kitchen in my father’s village outside Berat, watching her pull a clay dish from the oven. She grew up in Elbasan, and the dish came with her when she married. The yogurt top had puffed up like a golden cloud, trembling slightly as she set it on the counter. “Prit, prit,” she said.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/how-to-use-furgons-in-albania/Mon, 06 Apr 2026 10:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/how-to-use-furgons-in-albania/The first time I took a furgon, I stood at the wrong corner in Tirana for forty minutes, asked three people where the “bus station” was, and got three different answers. That was ten years ago. I have since taken hundreds of furgons across all twelve counties of Albania, and I can tell you this: once you understand the system, it is the cheapest, most authentic, and sometimes the only way to get around this country.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/welcome-to-guide-to-albania/Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/welcome-to-guide-to-albania/I have been writing about Albania for years, mostly in notebooks and messages to friends who kept asking me the same question: “Where should I go?” It always started with that. Where should I go, what should I eat, is it safe, is it cheap, is it worth it. And every time, I found myself writing longer and longer replies, because Albania is not a place you can sum up in a few lines.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/unesco-protected-sites-in-albania/Sat, 15 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/unesco-protected-sites-in-albania/Albania is a small country with a long memory. Within its borders sit four UNESCO World Heritage Sites that together span more than three thousand years of human history, from the stone foundations of an ancient Greek colony to the untouched beech forests that predate civilization itself. I have visited each of them more than once, in different seasons and different moods, and every return teaches me something new. Here is what you need to know before you go.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/the-enchanting-beach-of-ksamil-a-hidden-gem-in-albania/Sat, 15 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/the-enchanting-beach-of-ksamil-a-hidden-gem-in-albania/The first time I saw Ksamil, I was nineteen and crammed into the back of a furgon (minibus) with a bag of byrek on my lap and sand already between my toes from a stop in Saranda. The bus lurched around one last bend on the coastal road, and there it was: water so blue it looked artificial, like someone had poured paint into the Ionian Sea. I remember turning to the woman next to me, a stranger, and we just looked at each other and laughed.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/famous-hiking-trails-in-albania/Sun, 19 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/famous-hiking-trails-in-albania/I love our beaches. I really do. But every summer I watch tourists fly into Tirana, transfer straight to Ksamil, and leave without ever seeing the Albania that made me fall in love with this country in the first place. The mountains. Albania is one of the most vertically dramatic countries in Europe. Within a few hours of the coast, you can be standing on a ridge at 1,800 meters, listening to nothing but wind and the occasional distant cowbell.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/short-history-on-albanias-communism-era/Sun, 19 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/short-history-on-albanias-communism-era/My grandmother still flinches at loud knocks on the door. She is eighty-three years old, living in a sunny apartment in Tirana with geraniums on the balcony and a Turkish coffee habit that would alarm any cardiologist. But a sharp knock and her face changes. Just for a second. Then she laughs it off. That reflex is communism. Not the ideology in a textbook, not a political debate, but a lived thing that shaped how an entire generation moves through the world.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albanian-cuisine/Sun, 19 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albanian-cuisine/Albanian food does not shout. It does not try to impress you with technique or presentation or a foam of something on top of something else. It arrives at the table in clay dishes and cast iron pans, smelling like slow time and good ingredients, and it asks only that you sit down and eat properly. I grew up in a household where cooking was the central act of the day.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/nightlife-in-albania-something-for-everyone/Sun, 19 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/nightlife-in-albania-something-for-everyone/I’ll tell you something about Albanian nightlife that surprises most visitors: it doesn’t really start until you think it should be ending. If you show up at a bar at 9pm, you’ll find it half-empty, the bartender polishing glasses with no urgency whatsoever. By midnight, the same place will be so packed you can barely reach the bar. That’s just how we do things here. Going out in Albania is less about the drinking and more about the being together.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albanian-highest-mountains/Sun, 19 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/albanian-highest-mountains/Most people picture Albania as a Mediterranean beach destination, and yes, the coastline is gorgeous. But step inland and you will find a country defined by its mountains. Over 70 percent of Albania is mountainous terrain. Peaks above 2,000 meters line the borders, cut through the interior, and shape the culture of nearly every region. I have spent years working my way through these ranges, from easy summit trails that families can manage to serious alpine scrambles that left me questioning my life choices at 2,500 meters.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/best-time-to-visit-albania-2/Sun, 19 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/best-time-to-visit-albania-2/People always ask me the same question: “Elena, when should I visit Albania?” And I always answer with another question: “What do you want to do?” Because this small country somehow manages to offer a completely different experience depending on the month you arrive. Albania stretches from snow-capped alpine peaks in the north to a Mediterranean coastline that stays warm well into October. The mountains and the sea live in different climates, different rhythms, different moods.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/how-to-explore-albanian-coastline-transport-means-to-get-around-transport-in-albania/Sat, 18 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/how-to-explore-albanian-coastline-transport-means-to-get-around-transport-in-albania/The first time I drove the Albanian Riviera, I white-knuckled my way over the Llogara Pass with my windows down, the smell of pine forests mixing with salt air a thousand meters below. By the time I reached Dhermi, my hands ached and my heart was full. That drive changed how I think about coastal travel in Albania: how you get around here is not just logistics. It is part of the experience.https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/must-visit-southern-albanian-beaches-top-riviera-locations/Sat, 18 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://guidetoalbania.com/blog/must-visit-southern-albanian-beaches-top-riviera-locations/I have driven the SH8 coastal road from Llogara Pass down to Ksamil more times than I can count, and every single time, the moment the Ionian Sea appears below the mountains, I pull over and just look. The water is so absurdly blue that first-time visitors think the photos are edited. They are not. That is just what the Albanian Riviera looks like. But not every beach along this coast is the same.