Coffee on a wall, a hundred and ninety metres above the sea

Café Butterfly is up in Kastro, the walled old town on the hill above Himarë. Its tables stand in a line along a limestone parapet under a roof of split cane, and the ground on the far side of the wall drops away to the bay.

Get directions How to walk up

Round white tables and black openwork chairs along a mortared limestone parapet, under a roof of split cane on peeled timber poles, with terracotta pots of red geraniums on the wall and a green slope falling to a bay below — The terrace, looking out over the bay

01 — The parapet

One wall, and everything is arranged along it

The tables stand in a line against a mortared limestone wall, close enough that the coping does the work of a second table — terracotta pots along it, a chair pulled up to it, the hillside falling away on the far side.

The wall is the same pale rubble as the houses of the old town behind it, laid in rough courses with a wide mortar joint and gone green in the damp corners.

Dusk from the parapet at Café Butterfly — the sky apricot above a flat grey sea, a wooded ridge running out to the right, houses scattered on the slope below, two peeled roof poles and a vine crossing the top of the frame — Dusk, from the same wall

02 — The roof

Split cane on peeled poles, and a vine growing through it

Lengths of split cane are laid across a frame of peeled timber and tied at the crossings. It is a roof that filters rather than covers: the light comes through it in bars and moves across the tables all afternoon.

A grapevine has been trained up one of the posts and along the frame, so parts of the ceiling are leaves.

The register

Two lines from the sheet, and one from the terrace

CoffeeKafe: The first heading on the sheet and the reason the place exists. Espresso hot or over ice, and the long list of variations that follow it in Albania.
TrileçeTrileçe: A square of milk-soaked sponge under a sheet of set caramel, served cold on a blue-rimmed plate. It is on the sheet and it is in the photographs.
Outdoor seating: The tables in every frame here are on the terrace against the parapet, and the cane roof is the only thing over them.

Coffee and cake

A square of caramel-topped milk cake on a blue-rimmed speckled plate with two spoons, on a bare timber table, the stone parapet and the terrace out of focus behind — Trileçe, on the timber table

04 — The quarter

Inside the old town, seventy metres from the castle

Café Butterfly is up in Kastro, the walled old town on the hill above Himarë — a village of stone houses, some of them roofless, on lanes too narrow for a car.

Himarë Castle stands about seventy metres away and the Byzantine church of Saint Sergius and Bacchus about thirty-six. The sea is a kilometre off and a hundred and ninety metres down.

Roofless stone houses in rough limestone along a stepped lane in Himarë old town, a fig growing out of one wall, dry scrub-covered limestone ridges behind — Himarë old town, the quarter the café sits in

The guide to the town has more on the hill this sits on — its castle and old town and a walk through Kastro.

The drop

The bay, the ridge, and the open water beyond both

From the parapet the ground goes down in one long green slope. The bay is directly below with the roofs of the town along it, and a wooded ridge runs out to the right and ends in the water.

Late in the day the light behind that ridge turns apricot and the sea below it goes flat and grey.

The terrace