‘The birds will fly away’: can Albania’s flamingo revolution keep its wetlands free from Trumps and tourists?

A luxury resort backed by the US president’s family may be built on a wildlife-rich nature reserve in one of Europe’s poorest nations

If the real estate dreams of a billionaire political family come true, an island in one of Europe’s poorest countries will become a luxury hotel complex, sweeping up stretches of the wildlife-rich nature reserve that sits across the water.

No public consultation has taken place, but there are signs the idea is on the way to becoming reality. Albania has been rocked by nearly two weeks of fierce protests after fences and heavy machinery came to a sensitive wetland and preparatory work began on the tourism vision of Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner.

Domestic anger at the government’s corruption and global interest in the business dealings of the US president’s family have inflamed the unrest. But at its heart, the fight is driven by the same tension between environmental protection and short-term economic growth that is playing out across Europe .

The area’s status as a wildlife sanctuary was “something that amid all of this probably gets forgotten, but it’s what sparked the big outrage”, said Aleksandër Trajçe, the executive director of PPNEA, Albania’s largest conservation group. “If you want to see the Mediterranean as it used to be, before it was wrecked by tourism, this is one of the last – if not the last – spots where you would find it.”

Marshes, dunes, lagoons and salt pans stretch across the dynamic delta of the free-flowing Vjosa River, which was declared Europe’s first wild river national park in 2023. It sits on a major migratory corridor, hosting about 12% of the country’s wintering waterbirds, and is home to Eurasian otters, loggerhead sea turtles, bottlenose dolphins and Albanian water frogs. Flamingos add bright shocks of pink to striking blue shallows.

Unpublished conservation data shared with the Guardian shows 279 of the 2,529 species in the delta are internationally threatened. Aleko Miho, a biologist at the University of Tirana, who monitors the area with his students each year, said: “These are important habitats. It doesn’t matter who is behind it. What matters is the pressure it puts on a protected area.”

Machines have been seen in the Pishë Poro–Nartë protected area – which sits within the Vjosa-Narta protected landscape inside the delta – but it is unclear how much of the ecosystem would be affected by the proposed development.