“Comment is free, but facts are sacred.” — C. P. Scott, 1921.
“Vjosa poisoned: oil flows into the heart of the national park”
Erblin Vukaj · Originally published: 25 June 2025
In this article
A stream carrying crude oil flows into the Vjosa River, designated a national park by the Albanian government as Europe’s last wild river.
First-hand evidence from the RiverWatch and EcoAlbania team has exposed persistent pollution that the institutions kept quiet about, even though, a month earlier, they applied to have the Vjosa included in UNESCO’s Network of Biosphere Reserves.
“Oil runs into channels from a site where it is stored in open pools, a catastrophe! The containers and pipes there are completely rusted and leaking, a scandal,” Ulrich Eichelmann, director of RiverWatch, told Citizens.al.
The pollution originates at the oil station in Gorisht, Selenicë, built in the ’70s to receive and store oil from the field for transport to Ballsh. Gorisht’s oil flows from the station into the Vjosa after joining the Great Stream of Mërtiraj.
Citizens.al visited the outflow point and the station today. A group of 6 Albpetrol employees was there, having begun to clean the channel with an excavator just days after the pollution was reported.
A temporary solution to a larger problem. An EcoAlbania report shows that the Gorisht-Kocul area has more than 150 active wells spread across 6 km2, with the nearest point close to the Vjosa’s riverbed.
RiverWatch photographer and activist Joshua David Lim, who first documented the pollution, described this stretch of the Vjosa as “a dead river, where nothing survives”.
He told Citizens.al that this observation was reinforced by a dead snake that he and Eichelmann found on the thick layer of oil.
This polluted stretch of the Vjosa was discovered a few weeks ago, when Lim was photographing the river as part of an initiative with EcoAlbania to create a virtual map of pollution in the national park.
“The reality was absolutely shocking. I had never seen anything like it,” Lim told Citizens.al.
“I have travelled extensively, from the source to the Vjosa’s delta, and witnessed different kinds of pollution, such as rubbish and gravel extraction, but this oil spill is undoubtedly the worst,” the photographer continued.
Pollution recurring for years
This is not an isolated incident. In 2018, a report by Balkan Insight exposed the same form of pollution in the same place, between the villages of Karbunarë and Poçem, where concession companies stored and transported crude oil without effective controls.
“Years ago, I noticed oil leaks or slicks in Poçem, but I was not aware that this catastrophe was still happening,” Eichelmann said.
Although the drilling and storage sites lie outside the official boundaries of Vjosa National Park, the polluted stream crosses its boundary and joins the Vjosa within the protected territory.
“The government must immediately close the entire area, including the 1.5 km ‘river of oil’, as well as the pools with their decaying infrastructure,” Eichelmann stresses.
“A temporary solution”
On Monday, following the public reports, Albpetrol began cleaning the stream in Mërtiraj. On Wednesday, the Citizens.al team was on the ground to see the situation first-hand.
An excavator and two trucks were removing oil waste flowing towards the river. Although pollution remains present, its level was lower than in the shocking images documented earlier.
One of the workers told us this was the third day of cleaning, but the summer heat had melted the polluting material, making the process more difficult. He said the waste would be used as road fill in rural areas.
Around 150 metres away, an oil well continued operating normally, while the surrounding buildings, ruined and abandoned, presented the image of a neglected industry.
One worker repeated that the pollution came from old deposits created during the separation of oil from water and soil at the Gorisht station.
But the unanswered question is why this clean-up was not undertaken earlier, before the waste spread and melted in the heat, or before the Vjosa was granted national-park status.
A local resident told Citizens.al that the current efforts were futile unless action was taken directly at the source of the pollution, which continues to leak oil unchecked.
That same day, Albpetrol’s tanker trucks continued loading crude oil for refining, showing that economic activity in the area goes on uninterrupted while measures to stop the pollution are absent.
The organisation RiverWatch told Citizens.al that it had begun notifying international partners, including the European Union and the German bank KfW, about the alarming situation in the area.
“This is an environmental crime on a new scale,” the organisation’s director said, stressing that action would be taken on several fronts.
Vjosa National Park, declared in March 2023, aspires to become part of UNESCO’s Network of Biosphere Reserves. But oil leaks and the lack of an institutional response are seriously jeopardising this status.
“That field looked like a landscape from a depressing Hollywood film,” said Ulrich Eichelmann of RiverWatch, stressing that the Vjosa cannot be protected only on paper.
Two years after the park was declared, economic activities within and near it continue to put pressure on the protected territory. Urbanisation, mass tourism, pollution from oil extraction and the lack of institutional oversight are turning the “National Park” designation into a mere formality.
* This article was reviewed and corrected on 8 October 2026.