The castle perched on a limestone ridge above the modern town is the heart of Albanian national memory. From here, Gjergj Kastrioti — known as Skanderbeg — directed the Albanian resistance to Ottoman conquest from 1443 until his death in 1468, repelling four sieges and frustrating two sultans. The castle finally fell in 1478, ten years after his death.
What you see today is partly original — sections of the walls, the cistern, the prison, the lone surviving Fethiye Mosque and the Dollma Tekke — and partly a 1980s reconstruction commissioned by Enver Hoxha as a national monument. The views of the coastal plain from the ramparts run all the way to the Adriatic.