Oricum was a harbor on the Illyrian coast that developed in an Ancient Greek polis at the south end of the Bay of Vlorë on the southern Adriatic coast. It was located at the foot of the Akrokeraunian Mountains, the natural border between ancient Epirus and Illyria. Oricum later became an important Roman city between the provinces of Epirus Vetus and Epirus Nova in Macedonia. It is now an archaeological park of Albania, near modern Orikum, Vlorë County. Oricum holds such a strategic geographical position that the area has been in continuous usage as a naval base from antiquity to the present-days.

The Bay of Vlorë is a large bay of the Adriatic Sea situated along the Albanian Adriatic Sea Coast on the Mediterranean Sea in Southern Europe. It opens to the sea in the northwest and is largely surrounded by the lagoon of Narta in the north, the city of Vlorë in the northeast, the mountains of the Ceraunians in the east and southeast, and the peninsula of Karaburun in the southwest and west.