VJOSA-NARTA, Albania — In late April, heavy machinery began moving into the Pishë Poro-Narta protected landscape on Albania’s Adriatic coast without permits or public notice. Bulldozers and excavators felled coastal pine trees, flattened sand dunes, and cut new roads through previously untouched habitat. Then, barbed wire fences went up along the shoreline.
The incursion was the realization of a luxury resort development backed by Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law. The development plans of Kushner’s Affinity Partners, a private equity fund, stretch from the uninhabited Sazan Island into the Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape, the delta region of Albania’s Vjosa River that includes Pishë Poro-Narta.
Roughly twice the size of Paris, the Vjosa-Narta area shelters flamingos, Dalmatian pelicans (Pelecanus crispus), loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) and more than 70 endangered species, among them the Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus).
Neither Affinity Partners nor the office of the prime minister of Albania responded to Mongabay’s requests for comment.
Aerial drone video of demonstrators gathering at Dalan Beach on June 6 for a rally near the site of the original resort-construction site. Footage by Stefan Lovgren for Mongabay.
When protesters arrived at the site, security guards confronted them. Video of a demonstrator being dragged across the dunes on May 30 near the village of Zvërnec went viral. Soon demonstrations erupted in Tirana, the Albanian capital, in what has since been dubbed the Flamingo Revolution. The protests have grown larger every day, with tens of thousands demanding accountability for corruption, an end to environmental abuses, and the resignation of Edi Rama, Albania’s prime minister.
On June 6, hundreds of demonstrators made their way to Dalan Beach for a symbolic rally near the site of the original incursion. The barbed wire fences had been taken down a few days earlier and the machinery was gone. But no one there believed the battle was done.
Vjosa-Narta is one of the last intact delta wildernesses in the Mediterranean. Only 4% of the region’s deltas remain in a relatively undisturbed state, and this is the largest and most biodiverse. More than 2,300 species have been documented across a mosaic of lagoons, reed beds, salt flats and coastal dunes that formed over millennia.
“I call it the place where I go to meet the gods,” Hanais Mhilli, a 36-year-old baker and part-time hiking guide living in Vlorë, a city south of the delta, told Mongabay as he joined other protesters there who were boarding a bus to the beach.
At the heart of the delta lies the Narta Lagoon, a vast, shallow body of brackish water stretching more than 40 square kilometers (15.4 square miles) where the Vjosa River meets the Adriatic Sea. It hosts more than 20,000 wintering waterbirds and ranks among the most important wetlands on the Adriatic Flyway, the migration corridor along which millions of birds travel each year between Africa and Europe.
“Here we are not just fighting for Albania’s natural heritage, we are fighting for the natural heritage” everywhere, Aleksandër Trajçe, executive director of the Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania, told Mongabay. “Italy and Spain have destroyed miles and miles of coastline and now they’re trying to restore what they lost. Albania doesn’t have to make the same mistakes.”
For more than a decade, the Vjosa River — flowing from the Pindus Mountains in Greece through southern Albania to the Adriatic Sea — was at the center of one of Europe’s fiercest conservation battles. Though dammed near its headwaters in Greece, it runs entirely free through Albania, its channels shifting and braiding across gravel beds in patterns that once characterized rivers throughout Europe.
When the river faced a cascade of proposed hydropower projects, campaigners organized and won a landmark victory in 2023 as the Vjosa became Europe’s first Wild River National Park, pioneering a conservation model in which the river itself, not just the surrounding land, is protected from development.
But the delta was left out. Campaigners feared that pushing to include it would jeopardize the entire agreement, and it remained under a weaker designation, the Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape. Where the national park carries the strictest level of protection under international conservation standards, the protected landscape category permits limited development and human use.
Warning signs quickly stacked up. Maps had already been redrawn to accommodate a new international airport near the lagoon. Then, in early 2024, the Rama government amended the law on protected areas to allow construction of what it vaguely describes as high-end tourism projects, even inside protected zones. Three weeks later, Kushner’s Affinity Partners announced its plans.
“The delta was intentionally left out of the national park,” Trajçe said. “It was part of a political agenda.”
Albania hopes to join the European Union by 2030, a goal that requires closing the environment chapter of accession negotiations. This in turn requires repealing the very amendment that created the high-end tourism exception.
What Trajçe and other conservationists see unfolding now is a race against that deadline. “It’s a rush for development before they change the law,” he said. “It defies the whole purpose of a protected area.”
In September 2025, the delta received an additional layer of protection when it was included in the newly designated Vjosa Valley UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, a status the EU had supported as part of Albania’s accession process. But in January, Ivanka Trump, Kushner’s wife, visited Albania with architects and met with Rama, a trip widely interpreted as a signal that the Kushner project was moving toward construction.
Rama has made his position clear. Speaking on the sidelines of the EU-Western Balkans Summit in Montenegro on June 5, he dismissed the international attention the project has drawn. “If it wasn’t Jared, they wouldn’t give a shit,” he told Politico.
