National Park Orjen

Kotor – Montenegrin authorities will soon start the carrying out of the proclamation of Orjen for National Park, the project which is over 40 years old – it was said during the promotion of the “Guide through the massif of Orjen” in Kotor.
The president of the Mountain association “Subra” from Herceg Novi, the archeologist Zeljko Starcevic, who with Goran Komar is the author of that guide, said that it “maybe is a luck that that project was not carried out in the past decades, especially if you see what happened to other mountains across the former Yugoslavia, like Kopaonik.

– Unfortunately, national park doesn’t always mean the absolute protection, especially in the areas of Balkans. The mountain has to be a resource for the future, because it brings profit, but through the maintained form, and not trough mega ski paths, mega hotels and other mega projects – said Starcevic.

He thinks that it is “much wiser to work on the usage of the capacities that already exist or to adjust them for specific kinds of offer, that are accented in the guide, picnic and mountain tours as well as mountain biking”.

The organizer of the promotion was the Cultural center “Nikola Djurkovic”. The publisher of the guide is Mountain club “Subra” from Herceg Novi, and it was printed with the help of USAID. It has more than 100 pages with bout 400 photographs and a geographic map.

The president of the mountain club “Pestingrad” from Kotor, Marko Zornija, said that the massif of Orjen is one of the biggest ones on the Adriatic coast. It encloses 404 km2, it has 49 peaks which are higher than 1.500 m, and from it goes the Montenegrin coastal transversal.

Stracevic, by explaining why the promotion was held in Kotor, stated the record which until now was unknown to many and that is that Kotor municipality is bordering with Trebinje.

– People from Kotor probably think that their municipality is exclusively settled towards Lovcen. However, that is not the case, because the borders of the Kotor municipality go much further to the west and reach, through the massif of Orjen, all the way to the border with Hercegovina – said Starcevic.

I.K.