A second home in Bulgaria?
Around 23 000 new-built apartments South of Sunny beach are looking for buyers. This showed data of the ...
Posted by Yanko on 2008-04-01
Original article published in Neue Zürcher Zeitung - November 3, 2007. Translation below:
Nature Protection - A Trading Object in Bulgaria
Legal Farces Bring Environmental Damage
The new EU member Bulgaria boasts incomparable natural reserves and protected zones. The laws that regulate their protection are being violated constantly due to corruption practices. Currently, a hardly explored part of Rila Mountain is under threat by a projected winter ski zone.
Our correspondent for Southeastern Europe Martin Woker reports
Panichishte, the beginning of October
The Rila Lakes hut near the seven Rila Lakes in Rila Mountain can rightly pretend to be high on the list of the most desirable and beautiful places for a mountain trip on the Balkan Peninsula. The five-storey hut is located at 2200 m above sea level and within a nature protected zone. From here the glance reaches Vitosha Mountain to the north, at whose foothills Bulgaria's capital city Sofia huddles. The hut is situated amidst a broad former pasture bordered uphill by rocky peaks. Somewhere there a couple of mountain lakes are nestled. The one with the deepest blue color is euphemistically tagged Europe's deepest glacier lake. A couple of pack-horses graze nearby, an eagle circles up in the air, isolated hikers emerge on the horizon. Endless silence rules over everything. For how long more?
Superb ‘Hinterland’
A Bulgarian hiking group has gathered in front of the hut upon the pipe signal of its leader and is preparing to start off. Hiking societies of this kind are a living relict from a bygone era when Rila Mountain was only visited by local tourists who traversed it in organized groups. During communism, the mountainous regions of Southeast Europe knew predominantly one form of tourist activity: holiday homes of state enterprises and sanatoriums as well as scattered simple huts maintained by hikers' societies. Personal vacation houses or private hotel complexes were unknown. For this reason, wide mountainous areas in this sphere of influence of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia remained intact in a way one can hardly see in the Alps.
This holds true for Rila Mountain whose rocky peaks reach up to 2900 m in height. The significance of the Seven Rila Lakes for Bulgaria is surpassed only by the Pirin mountain range lying south from here which is listed as a UNESCO world heritage site because of its enormous biodiversity. With its long coastline on the Black Sea, Bulgaria is internationally mostly known as a summer holiday destination, but there are real connoisseurs who have long ago discovered the rich landscape, cultural, historical, ecological, and culinary qualities of its 'hinterland'. So has Slaveyko Staykov.
An emerging market full of promise
The jovial middle-aged man who embodies in his look and appearance the young Bulgarian money elite is the director of Rila Sport. Three years ago, his company approached the leadership of Sapareva Banya municipality which is responsible for the region. Meanwhile, a fruitful mutual cooperation between the two developed. Out of it was born a project that will involve more than a hundred million Euro of investment. It encompasses a hotel complex for spa tourism in Sapareva Banya that will use the town's thermal springs and a new center with hotels and chalets in the existing resort area Panichishte which will be made accessible by means of 24 ski lifts and chair lifts. A Canadian company specialized in the development of winter resorts prepared the master plan for the project. The goal is, they claim, nature-friendly quality tourism, but they omit to mention the fact that just a few kilometers east has begun the construction of an equally gigantic resort project by the name of Super Borovets, with the sultan of Oman as one of the investors.
The development of Rila promises bountiful profits, at least for its initiators. A chair lift up to Rila Lakes hut must be ready even before the beginning of winter. Hectic construction is underway at its lower station. Rila Sport has taken the responsibility to build public infrastructure for a future 10,000 guests in the resort area Panichishte; a reservoir, sewage pipes, and a church have been already built. In return for its promise the company acquired 200 ha of land in the future resort from the municipality at the preferential rate of 7 EUR for square meter. Meanwhile, the land is already being traded at prices ten times higher, the trend going up. Such phenomenal increases in the price of land were typical for other places in Bulgaria in the last couple of years - this is characteristic for an emerging market, financial specialists say. So, better hurry up and secure a piece of the cake for yourself before the good idea occurred to others!
Tourist Disaster-zone
That's what thousands of British investors thought when they bought housing property in Bulgaria in the last couple of years. The results were disastrous. The small mountain town Bansko, situated just less than three hours south of Sofia at the feet of Pirin Mountain, was gripped by an unprecedented construction mania. The development in Bansko dwarfs all construction sins committed in the Alps and turned the region into an ecological and urban planning disaster. Those who acquired a vacation apartment there now pay a tough price for their avarice: the prices have been going down since last summer. The harm has been however inflicted and the encroachments on the nearby biosphere reserve are irreversible. How can one possibly explain that?
"Money, money, and again money", answers a foreign pundit based in Sofia who is quite familiar with Bulgaria's economic development in general and with its tourism development more specifically. Everything is bribable in this country, nature protection is a tradable commodity, he argues and laments the fact that the Bulgarian environmental campaigners have just now faintly started to make their voice heard. Until recently they weren't around at all because the majority of the population was totally engrossed in its everyday concerns. Bulgaria's accession into the EU woke up a submerged self-consciousness in the country that started to manifest itself in a collective concern about the interaction with nature. More than 100 people gathered in the center of Sofia in the end of August and protested against the appropriation of Rila Mountain by speculators gone wild. The protest was entirely civilized with people permanently crossing the pedestrian crosswalk. Traffic collapsed, the police intervened thrashing, and the angry demonstrators asked the guardians of order: "Who do you serve - the people or the mafia?"
Misscommunication
It's actually a problem of communication, the representative of Rila Sport Slaveyko Staykov explains. They should have tried to hold talks with environmentalists, he says. Stirred by the protest, some of the serious Bulgarian media finally stumbled upon the Super Panichishte project. A whole abyss of environmental and legislative violations uncovered itself. It is a fact that two-thirds of the planned lifts will lie within the protected zone. Hundreds of hectares of forests must be cut inside an area from which Sofia takes its drinking water in order to build the planned 80 km of ski tracks. For the chair lift currently under construction there's neither a concession contract, nor a construction permit. Not to mention the permits for the rest of the facilities. Confronted with these facts, the company director remains unperturbed: "We will get all the permits", he says and sounds like a winner who knows that the authorities back him.
This most certainly applies for Sapareva Banya's mayor. In the presence of Rila Sport's director, he praises this great company which will finally bring investment and economic growth to his underdeveloped municipality. The young see hope in the future again, he says and enumerates several foreign investment companies that became active in the region. One of them is Fairplay.
The coy question about the name of the grand benefactor makes the mayor awkward. In various ways the municipality is entangled with Rila Sport and does business with them, but at the same time neither the mayor, nor the municipal counselors know who this company really belongs to. Did we hear correct? Rila Sport's director suddenly becomes tight-lipped. It's a joint stock company, he says, registered on the British Virgin Islands. All clear? No, not at all. We leave it to the mayor to ponder upon the possibility that behind this joint-stock company an evil person can hide, a heroin trader, or a former agent of the old regime who stole public money and now wants to launder it. The question remains, the conversation is closed. Misscommunication.
Nothing learned
Will the national authorities put the kibosh on the project? The initiators apparently don't have such fears. They have set up a luxury office in the best business area of Sofia where they proudly presented their project on a huge video screen and as a true-to-scale model. The presentation dispels the last doubts. Sustainable and environment-friendly the enterprise certainly isn't. The possibility of developing sustainable tourism remained explicitly unconsidered, even though there are well-meaning Bulgarian experts available. It seems nothing has been learned from "Case Bansko" which dramatically demonstrated how traditional tourism projects might bring a lot of money to construction companies and property speculators in their initial phase, but in the long run they bring only financial and ecological disaster to the community. Moreover, the latest climate changes make the development of winter sport resorts in regions below 1500 m above sea level quite problematic. How much these changes will impact Bulgaria is currently being scientifically investigated, but no results are available yet.
Of course, the protesting environmentalists know all about the dubious snow situation in Rila Mountain. However, this is their tiniest concern, assure us the two forest engineers and the lawyer who accompany us on a tour around the affected region. They are knowledgeable when they explain the fearful harmful effects to the flora and fauna, and they can't help flying into a rage that always leads them to a question which is at the root of their justified anger: "What use are to us all the EU-compliant laws when the state doesn't ensure their implementation?"
Associated Galleries:
Construction works at Super Panichishte
Associated Property Places:
Panichishte