‘The birds will fly away’: can Albania’s flamingo revolution keep its wetlands free from Trumps and tourists?

If the real estate dreams of a billionaire political family come true, an island in one of Europe’s poorest countries will become a luxury hotel complex, sweeping up stretches of the wildlife-rich nature reserve that sits across the water.

No public consultation has taken place, but there are signs the idea is on the way to becoming reality. Albania has been rocked by nearly two weeks of fierce protests after fences and heavy machinery came to a sensitive wetland and preparatory work began on the tourism vision of Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner.

Domestic anger at the government’s corruption and global interest in the business dealings of the US president’s family have inflamed the unrest. But at its heart, the fight is driven by the same tension between environmental protection and short-term economic growth that is playing out across Europe.

The area’s status as a wildlife sanctuary was “something that amid all of this probably gets forgotten, but it’s what sparked the big outrage”, said Aleksandër Trajçe, the executive director of PPNEA, Albania’s largest conservation group. “If you want to see the Mediterranean as it used to be, before it was wrecked by tourism, this is one of the last – if not the last – spots where you would find it.”

Marshes, dunes, lagoons and salt pans stretch across the dynamic delta of the free-flowing Vjosa River, which was declared Europe’s first wild river national park in 2023. It sits on a major migratory corridor, hosting about 12% of the country’s wintering waterbirds, and is home to Eurasian otters, loggerhead sea turtles, bottlenose dolphins and Albanian water frogs. Flamingos add bright shocks of pink to striking blue shallows.

Unpublished conservation data shared with the Guardian shows 279 of the 2,529 species in the delta are internationally threatened. Aleko Miho, a biologist at the University of Tirana, who monitors the area with his students each year, said: “These are important habitats. It doesn’t matter who is behind it. What matters is the pressure it puts on a protected area.”

Machines have been seen in the Pishë Poro–Nartë protected area – which sits within the Vjosa-Narta protected landscape inside the delta – but it is unclear how much of the ecosystem would be affected by the proposed development.

The project has not received planning permission or an environmental impact assessment, and the Albanian government, which has welcomed the scheme, said the continuing works were for technical surveys and environmental measurements rather than construction.

“In the meantime, the bulldozers are really progressing,” said Trajçe. “They’re destroying the dunes. They’re opening new roads. The area has been fenced off … it’s really a wild west situation.”

Albania is among the poorest countries in Europe but boasts some of its wildest landscapes. The combination has drawn in holidaymakers seeking cheap getaways – a record 12 million tourists visited Albania in 2025 – but the government has also successfully enticed elites. In May, Ivanka Trump said she was “just captivated” when she swam up to Sazan Island and hiked barefoot to the top.

“It’s not even a business for me, despite the scale of it,” she told the podcast host David Senra about her plans to turn the area into a vast resort. “It feels like a challenge more than anything else: the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live, and trying to really build something that’s a tangible manifestation of that.”

But many fear that Albania’s tourism push has led the government to disregard nature protection. It redrew the borders of the protected area in 2022 to allow the construction of Vlora airport, which had hoped to see its first commercial flight this month but is still awaiting an operating permit. In 2024 it loosened conservation laws to allow the construction of five-star hotels even in protected areas.

Albania is under pressure to tighten its environmental laws to meet the requirements of the EU, which it hopes to join by 2030. On Tuesday the European Commission said it should refrain from actions that undermine its bid and urged it to “act without delay” in complying with environmental rules. The same day, 96 civil society organisations wrote to the Albanian parliament to demand they repeal the 2024 amendment to the environmental protection law, citing the risks it posed to joining the EU.

The office of Edi Rama, the prime minister, said the fencing of private property was the lawful right of its owner and disputed having reduced the size of the protected area to build the airport.

A spokesperson said projects should not be condemned before they existed. “No European country, including Albania, operates on the principle that development and environmental protection are mutually exclusive,” they said. “The challenge is not exclusion but balance.”

Affinity Partners, Kushner’s investment firm, referred a request for comment to a PR agency, which said Affinity was not involved in the project and “investors are involved in their personal capacity”. A spokesperson for the partners involved in the project said he could not comment on the scale because it was still in the planning phase.

Sazan Real Estate Development LLC, the developer, said it respected continuing public and institutional processes. Asher Abehsera, the chair, said: “Our focus remains on responsible stewardship, environmental enhancement, job creation and creating long-term value for local communities.”

Arup, a global engineering firm that consulted on the project, said its scope was to provide “technical advice on the initial masterplanning” but that it had completed its work last year and was no longer involved.

The Vjosa-Narta ecosystem is not as unspoiled by human activity as Ivanka Trump or some protesters claim. A defunct oil-fired power plant sits beside the lagoon, while the beaches are home to dozens of guest houses, restaurants and even a music festival. However, scientists say it has been spared much of the pollution that plagues other parts of Albania’s coast, as well as the overcrowding that characterises much of the Mediterranean.

The planes, cars and construction that come with a large resort would disturb a special ecosystem that is “relatively untouched” compared with other dunes and lagoons in the Mediterranean, said Miho. “The birds will fly away, for sure.”

The Guardian wp:paragraph