2026-07-29 · about 2 min read
What the declaration says, in order
On 15 March 2023, the Albanian Government declared the Vjosa Wild River National Park together with IUCN, Patagonia, the Save the Blue Heart of Europe campaign NGOs and more than 30 specialists. The declaration made it Europe's first Wild River National Park.
The park holds IUCN Protected Area Management Category II, which is reserved for large, largely unspoilt areas managed primarily to protect ecosystem integrity.
There is a second, distinct designation nearby: UNESCO added the Vjosa Valley to its World Network of Biosphere Reserves in 2025. A biosphere reserve is not the same instrument as the national park, and neither one makes the Vjosa a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Two protected-area names, one valley. That distinction matters when you read travel copy that blurs them together.
How much river does Phase I protect?
The designation protects over 400 km of free-flowing river from damming and industrial disruption, and Phase I covers 12,727 hectares of river corridor and surrounding ecosystem.
Phase I became operational by early 2024. Phase II is planned to bring the river's major tributaries into the park.
These are the numbers the declaration itself carries. Broader figures you may meet elsewhere — gorge lengths, depths, species counts per habitat — often do not trace back to any official source, and we do not repeat them here.
From the Pindus to the Adriatic
The river begins in the Pindus range in Greece, where it is called the Aoös, and flows through southern Albania — passing Këlcyrë and Përmet — to its delta on the Adriatic.
What survives along that corridor: the river and its surroundings host over 1,100 animal species, and among them 13 animal species and 2 plant species are assessed as globally threatened on the IUCN Red List.
Those counts come from the 2023 declaration press release. They describe the river system as a whole, so we treat them as a ceiling for any claim about one particular stretch of bank.
Read next: from declaration to river
Continue with the river corridor's ecology, or see how the declaration shapes the rafting concept. Valley-wide context lives in the Vjosa Valley guide.