Berat

Berat is what a hillside does when it decides every house needs a front-row seat. White Ottoman houses stack up both banks of the Osum, windows punched into the slope so densely the town earned the name City of a Thousand Windows, while the castle on the ridge has been lived in since antiquity and never quite emptied out. Mangalem and Gorica face each other across the river like two neighborhoods that never agreed which side was the view. UNESCO listed it with Gjirokastër in 2008, which is a fancy way of saying the place still looks like someone forgot to modernize it — and that is exactly why you stop.