Blue Eye

The Blue Eye, Syri i Kaltër in Albanian, is a karst spring just west of the village of Muzinë in Finiq Municipality, inland from Saranda. The water rises from a…The Blue Eye, Syri i Kaltër in Albanian, is a karst spring just west of the village of Muzinë in Finiq Municipality, inland from Saranda. The water rises from a hole whose full depth is still unknown: divers have gone down to fifty metres without reaching the bottom, and the blue of the water can be seen from more than fifty metres down.

The spring is the first source of the Bistricë river, which runs for about 25 km and ends in the Ionian Sea south of Saranda; for this reason it is also called the springs of Bistricë. The source sits at an altitude of 152 m and discharges around 18,400 litres per second. It dried up for a time in the summer of 2004, and a wildfire burned part of the site in the summer of 2017.

Once a natural monument of 180 hectares, the site became a natural park in January 2022, when the protected area was enlarged to 293.3 hectares, with oak and sycamore trees around the pool. Access by car is from the Saranda to Gjirokastër road, turning off at the village of Krongj.