The Kopaonik Mountain is getting yet another luxury resort, a five-star hotel has opened, a premium experience in Kopaonik, a heliport is being built with a new garage – these are just some of the headlines about this favourite winter tourist centre in recent years.
Along with luxury and glamour, there are also other types of headlines, portraying a different situation on the mountain – “Ugly construction on Kopaonik”, “Kopaonik’s water supply cut off due to unplanned construction”, “Faeces flowing in the Kopaonik National Park”…
In recent years, the mountain of Kopaonik has become a hub of construction activity and a golden goose for winter tourism. Data collated by the State Statistics Office show that in August of last year, as many as 28.4% of all building permits out of a total of 2,843 were issued by the Raška authorities (Kopaonik comes under Raška territorial unit).
Can Kopaonik handle accelerated construction, who controls the buildings that have already been built, how many illegal buildings are there – these are some of the topics that the eKapija portal tried to investigate.
Considering all the above, the company that manages the mountain, the Kopaonik National Park has proposed a ban on further construction, while Raška authorities are against it claiming that construction activities on the mountain bring better infrastructure. However, the problem is not that simple.
As we learned from the Kopaonik National Park, most of the construction was and is still being in the tourist centres located along the border of the Kopaonik National Park – there is the Brzeće tourist centre, for which permits are issued by the municipality of Brus, and the Weekend Village tourist centre, for which permits are issued by the municipality of Raška.
“Collectively, the capacities of these two “smaller” tourist centres already exceed the tourist accommodation capacities on the Kopaonik. The reason for such a large expansion of construction that took place in the last few years lies primarily in the high price of the new apartments here, but also due to a large number of visitors during the winter tourist season”, Predrag Šumarac from the Kopaonik National Park says.
(eKapija, 10.08.2022)
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