High Scardus Trail

The High Scardus Trail is a transnational hiking (and future biking) trail with a total length of 495 km covering the border area of Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia. The trail passes through six national parks, two in Northern Macedonia, one in Kosovo, and three in Albania. If you take into account the numerous connecting trails to the main trail, which start/lead to populated areas and serve as access or exit points of the trail, the High Scardus Trail can be seen as a system of interconnected trails. This is especially important for planning your own tour. For the thru hike of the main trail in its entirety, from its starting point in the northeastern part of the Shari Mountains in Macedonia to its end the Prespa region in Albania, it takes about twenty hiking days, plus the occasional rest or swimming day. This is much longer than the average trip, however, the network character of the path with a plethora of connecting links allows for the creation of tours and routes of different lengths, duration and difficulty levels, meeting the interest and need of different visitors from curious day walkers, long distance trekkers, peak baggers and mountain bikers. The mountain tourism product High Scardus Trail is a result of the project Future Prospects through Mountain Tourism, implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) over the course of 2017. The project's aim was to improve the employment opportunities in the tourism sector in the border region between Macedonia, Kosovo, and Albania by developing and promoting existing and new regional adventure tourism offers.