Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are pouring $1.4 billion into transforming Sazan Island — a rugged, 1,400-hectare Albanian island sealed from the public for over fifty years — into one of the most exclusive resorts on Earth. The project, backed by Kushner’s private equity firm Affinity Partners, pairs Cold War military architecture with Aman Resorts hospitality and Carbone dining. It started, improbably, with a barefoot swim.
How a Barefoot Hike Became a Billion-Dollar Investment
The origin story doesn’t sound like private equity — it sounds like a vacation accident. Ivanka Trump has described the moment publicly: she and Kushner were on a friend’s boat somewhere in the Mediterranean when they stopped near the Albanian coast, swam ashore, and hiked barefoot all the way to the top of Sazan’s dramatic cliffs. “We were just captivated,” she said. “It stayed with us ever since.” Over the following years, they developed the opportunity through Affinity Partners and secured strategic investor status from the Albanian government.
What they found was not just a beautiful island. Sazan Island had been completely closed to the public from 1946 to 1991, when Albania’s communist dictator Enver Hoxha converted it into a fortified military outpost. Because no one could enter for five decades, the island accidentally became a preserved ecosystem — dense Mediterranean vegetation, intact marine life, and a sprawling network of tunnels and roughly 3,600 concrete bunkers frozen in time. The accidental consequence of extreme isolation was a pristine environment. That’s exactly what the Kushners are selling. Just as the ultra-wealthy have reshaped other forgotten corners of the Mediterranean, Sazan represents the next frontier of exclusivity.
What the Resort Will Actually Look Like
The design philosophy is deliberate restraint — or at least that’s the pitch. Rather than imposing conventional resort architecture onto the cliffs, the team is working with what Ivanka called “the greatest living architects” to create structures that “rise from” the landscape itself. The term she used was architecture that must be “fully integrated” — scalloped buildings designed to disappear into the island’s rock and vegetation rather than dominate it.
Aman Resorts will manage the property, a hospitality brand that has built its identity around near-invisible luxury in remote, historically significant locations. Dining will be curated by Carbone, the Italian-American restaurant group with locations in New York, Las Vegas, and Miami. Some of the original Cold War bunkers are planned for preservation and integration into the resort design rather than demolition — a move that frames the military past as an amenity.
The project extends beyond the island itself. Alongside Sazan, the Kushners control roughly five miles of beachfront on a peninsula directly across from the island, featuring a lagoon on one side and white-sand beaches on the other. Beyond Albania, Affinity Partners is also moving on the former Yugoslav Ministry of Defense building in Belgrade, Serbia, which is slated for conversion into a luxury hotel and memorial complex — part of a broader Balkan real estate push.
The Part No One Is Rushing to Advertise
Before a single guest checks in, the development team faces a cleanup problem that isn’t common in luxury hospitality: unexploded Cold War-era ammunition scattered across a former military base. Clearing that ordnance is a prerequisite to construction, and it’s a logistical and safety challenge that doesn’t show up in the architectural renderings.
Environmental groups have raised alarms about what a multi-billion dollar resort will do to an ecosystem that survived intact precisely because no one was allowed near it. Sazan’s marine environment — sitting where the Adriatic and Ionian seas meet — and its terrestrial biodiversity are the very things that make the project attractive, and also the things most at risk once large-scale construction begins. The Albanian government has backed the project as an economic driver for tourism and local jobs, but that support doesn’t resolve the tension between preservation and development. For now, the bunkers remain. The ammunition needs to go first.
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