Kushner-linked Albania resort plan sparks protests over coastal development

Barbed-wire-topped fences at the edge of Zvërnec turned a proposed luxury resort into a flashpoint over who controls Albania’s coast. Local residents, environmental campaigners and anti-corruption prosecutors are now challenging a project tied to Jared Kushner that would reach into the uninhabited island of Sazan and the Vjosa-Narta protected landscape.

The protests intensified in late May 2026 after the fencing blocked access to the beach. Private security guards and residents clashed when people tried to enter the fenced area, and anger spread quickly from the southern coast to Tirana, where hundreds marched before thousands later gathered outside Prime Minister Edi Rama’s office. Demonstrators carried a blunt message, chanting “Cancel the project” and “Albania is not for sale,” while also calling for Rama’s resignation.

At the center of the dispute is the project’s footprint in one of the country’s most sensitive coastal zones. Environmental groups say the Vjosa-Narta wetlands shelter flamingos, seals and sea turtle nesting sites, and in January 2026 about 40 environmental organizations called for the resort plans to be suspended because of the risk to biodiversity. Critics say a February 2024 amendment opened protected zones to five-star resort development, allowing a foreign-backed luxury scheme to move deeper into land and waters that were supposed to be safeguarded.

SPAK, Albania’s anti-corruption prosecution office, has opened an investigation into controversial 2024 changes to protected-status rules and land ownership in the area. The probe has heightened scrutiny of how land titles were changed and who benefited from the shift, as allegations of corruption and secrecy have followed the project since Kushner unveiled it in August 2024.

The development has also become a property-rights fight. Residents, including members of Albania’s Greek minority in southern Albania, say family land was taken through an unjust expropriation process and warn that the resort would damage the historical and social character of the area. In southern Albania, those concerns have merged with a broader fear that local communities will bear the environmental cost while outside investors capture the gains.

The Albanian government has defended the plan as part of a strategy to draw high-end tourism and advance Albania’s push toward European Union membership. The developer, Zvernec South Adriatic Development, says the land was acquired lawfully and says the project could cost about $4 billion and generate more than 10,000 jobs directly and indirectly over five years. Kushner and Ivanka Trump visited Albania in early 2026 to advance the proposal, underscoring how closely the project has become tied to the Trump family’s influence and to a wider test of transparency in a small democracy.