Municipalities are considered the basic administrative division of Albania. Since
its Declaration of Independence from the
Ottoman Empire in 1912, Albania has reorganized
internal administration 21 times. From independence until the year 2000, regional government was organized into
regions () of varying numbers, size, and importance. They were consolidated into groups comprising 12
counties in 1991. Following the
1998 constitutional reforms, the 36 regions of the time were abolished entirely and replaced by the larger counties and two kinds of municipalities: urban municipalities () and
rural ones (). In 2014, this was revised to reduce the number of urban municipalities to 61 and extended their jurisdiction over the surrounding countryside to create regional administrations, while using the
communesrenamed
administrative units ()as a third-level division for
local government. This first took effect in the
2015 local elections. == List ==