Potam · Himarë · Albania
The castle is the building, not the address
Guests arrive expecting a fortress and find a seaside hotel with a battlement on it. Both readings are fair, because the castle in the name is the one the owners built.
Along the roofline of the seaward pavilion there is a run of triangular merlons — wedges that meet at the base, with no square embrasure cut between them. Underneath them the loggia opens as a run of pointed arches. The entrance is a rusticated limestone arch with a studded oak door set into it, the pergola sits on cast Corinthian columns, and a window cut through a thick wall is left as a bare slot. None of it is medieval and none of it pretends to be — it is a modern seaside building wearing a battlement.
- Merlon shape
- Triangular
- Embrasures between them
- None
- Frames in this set showing the parapet
- 1
The profile is read off the parapet in the frame below rather than chosen. The photograph is soft and the wall recedes across it, so no merlon width in metres and no dependable ratio survives it — what does survive is the shape, and every merlon drawn on this site is cut to it.
The merlons over the loggia, oleander in the foreground — the only frame that shows the parapet · booking gallery 27716001
The oleander in the foreground is the one saturated colour on the property, and the accent on every page of this site is sampled out of it.
The other castle
Kalaja e Himarës
There is a real castle at Himarë. It stands over the old village on the ridge north-west of the bay — medieval, walled, still lived in around its edges, and the reason the town is where it is.
From this hotel it is 3,543 m in a straight line on a bearing of 326°, and 172 m up: the hotel sits at 6.4 m above the sea and the castle at 178 m. It is a drive up the hill and then a walk through the lanes, not a stroll across the garden, and nothing on this site should suggest otherwise.
And back down here
A balcony over the water is the thing this place actually sells
The battlements are a pleasure and they are why the hotel has its name. The reason to book it is the other side of the building: two room types, both facing the sea, both with a furnished balcony, and a beach on the far side of the garden wall.