At Këlcyrë, the Vjosa is no promenade. It enters the limestone gorge from the west, squeezed between rock and the old road, and leaves it as a plain river. The National Tourism Agency calls it “one of the last wild rivers in Europe”. The national park declaration put that status in writing.
What is protected on this stretch
On 15 March 2023, the Vjosa and its surroundings were declared Europe’s first Wild River National Park, protected under IUCN Category II across more than 400 kilometres of free-flowing river. Phase I covers 12,727 hectares and became operational by early 2024; Phase II will add further tributaries.
The park was created by the Albanian Government, IUCN and Patagonia, alongside the Save the Blue Heart of Europe campaign NGOs and more than 30 specialists. The river and its surroundings host over 1,100 species of animals; of those, 13 animal species and 2 plant species are assessed as globally threatened on the IUCN Red List.
The Këlcyrë section sits exactly where the river narrows. The gravel bed and the limestone flanks are not visitor amenities — they are the reason this stretch is inside the protected area.
The karst springs and the town’s water
Springs are part of Këlcyrë’s identity, and their documentation is thin. AKT lists Black Water (Uji i Zi) among the town’s attractions as a natural spring — that is the full extent of the official description. Wikidata keeps a record of it as a karst spring of this municipality.
Stories of mills and channels around these waters circulate in local memory, but no verified source describes them site by site. This piece does not label an unidentified remain a mill, and gives no discharge figures, no temperatures, no spring counts — simply because none are published.
- Uji i Zi: a natural spring per AKT; a karst spring per Wikidata. Nothing more.
- The gorge’s other springs: not inventoried in any official source linked here.
- Watermills: undocumented in the literature we checked.
What remains undocumented
Winter moves the bed. Flows rise, gravel shifts, channels change place — that is how a free river works. But no published measurement gives discharge in cubic metres for the gorge at Këlcyrë, and no official source counts the channels of this stretch. The figures circulating on blogs, we do not repeat.
If you want to see the river where it is narrowest and most legible, the gorge article follows the same road. And for what is known — and unknown — about the spring called Black Water, its dedicated piece is given over to exactness.