Himare taxi vs car rental comparison

The maths: a taxi to Borsh costs more than renting the car for the day

A one-way taxi from Himare to Borsh Beach, Albania’s longest beach 35km south, costs around 30€. Return, that’s 60€, and it only gets you to one beach. A taxi to Qeparo, closer at around 17km south, runs about 20€ one way.

A rental car costs less than that single return taxi fare and covers every beach on this page, both directions, in one day. Rates at this Himare location start from 51€/day in season, and prices are pulled daily so they move with demand; outside peak summer weeks, cheap car hire Himare Albania rates on the same fleet can run as low as 16€/day. Either way, the comparison holds: one rental car day rate against two or three separate taxi fares, and the car is still sitting outside your accommodation the next morning. This himare beach hopping car rental approach is the only way to see more than one or two beaches without paying for a driver to wait around all day.

Taxi prices along the SH8 aren’t metered and tend to be negotiated on the spot, so treat the figures above as a working guide rather than a fixed rate. The direction of the comparison doesn’t change either way.

Car rental Himare beach hopping · North

North of Himare: Palasa, Jal, Dhermi and Gjipe Beach

Aquarium Beach sits right at the edge of Himare itself, a five-minute walk or drive from the centre, with clear water over rock and pebble that gives the beach its name. Heading north from there on the SH8, the road climbs and dips along the coast toward four more beaches, each different enough to be worth the stop. A car hire Himare Dhermi run is the busiest leg of this drive, especially once the road narrows past Jal.

The car rental Himare Gjipe Beach trip is really two stages: the drive to the marked parking area off the SH8, then the walk. The gjipe beach canyon car rental Himare route only works with your own vehicle, since the dirt track isn’t covered by any bus route and a taxi waiting at the top for several hours gets expensive fast.

Car rental Himare Porto Palermo · South

South of Himare: Porto Palermo, Qeparo, Borsh and Buneci

South of town, the SH8 runs closer to the water, past a 19th-century castle and three beach villages strung along the coast toward Saranda. A car rental Himare Borsh Beach day, the longest drive on this list, is also the one most worth doing properly rather than rushing.

The Porto Palermo Ali Pasha car hire Himare route is the easiest stop on this list to underestimate. It takes 12 minutes to get there and most visitors give it 20, but the castle and the bay together are worth closer to an hour if you want to actually walk the walls rather than just look at them from the car park.

Car rental Himare greek culture

Himare’s Greek culture is something you’ll actually notice

Walk through Himare’s old town, on the hillside above the modern strip along the SH8, and street signs and shop names appear in both Albanian and Greek. Sunday services at the Orthodox churches run in Greek, and Greek Orthodox Easter, which often falls on a different date to the Western calendar, is the biggest event of the year in town, with processions through the old town and family gatherings that spill out onto the street.

This isn’t a cultural display put on for visitors. It’s the everyday language and religious life of a community that has lived in this part of the coast for centuries, with strong family and economic ties to Greece itself, just across the water. Greek-speaking travellers, and Greek diaspora visiting the region, tend to notice this immediately and often comment that Himare feels different from anywhere else on the Albanian coast. A rental car makes it easy to split time between the old town on the hill and the beach strip below, rather than choosing one or the other.

SH8 road trip car rental Himare

Driving the SH8: what actually matters

The SH8 between Vlore and Himare crosses the Llogara Pass, just over 1,000m above sea level, on a narrow road with sharp hairpin bends and not much in the way of a barrier in places. It’s a manageable drive in a normal car at a sensible pace, but it isn’t a road to take quickly, especially with oncoming coach traffic in summer.

There are no fuel stations on the SH8 between Himare and Vlore. Fill up in Himare before setting off in either direction, since running low on the pass itself isn’t a position you want to be in. South of Himare, fuel is easier to find again in Qeparo and Borsh.

South toward Saranda, the road is gentler, running closer to sea level past Qeparo and Borsh before climbing again near the Albanian-Greek border crossing at Kakavije. Most of the beach villages on this page have small grocery shops but limited choice, so picking up water and snacks in Himare before a full beach-hopping day is worth doing.

Rent a car Himare · Beyond the Riviera

Continuing south or north from Himare

Saranda is 75km south, with the Ksamil islands and the Butrint ruins both within easy reach once you’re there, and a car rental Saranda drop-off works if the trip continues that way rather than back through Himare. North, Vlore is 80km, with onward connections toward Durres and the airports at Tirana and Rinas if you’re flying out rather than driving back. Inland, the old Ottoman town of Gjirokaster sits roughly 90 minutes from Himare through the mountains, a common detour for travellers splitting a Riviera trip with a couple of nights inland.