The number of tourist visits to Bosnia and Herzegovina this year exceeded the record from 2019. Tourism is one of the branches that has great potential, but is still underutilized. The development of sustainable tourism in the countries gathered around the European Strategy for the Adriatic-Ionian Region is one of the key priorities that our country dealt with during the one-year presidency of this strategy. A chance for greater development are targeted regional projects that will be financed from IPA funds.
Mak Muranović is an artist and tourist guide. He has combined tourism and art into one so that he offers tourists unique tours in which the focus is to show tourists how art developed during the war, but also to present the rich cultural heritage of our country. He says that tourism has a great potential which, due to the constitutional arrangement of the country and carelessness of the authorities, has not been used enough.
“Our main mission is to actually keep the National Art Gallery of BiH, which is on the verge of financial collapse, and regardless of politics, we must not allow it to go out of business. If we can do anything about these projects, it is that almost every tour includes a visit to the gallery, to people come to visit it,” says Muranović.
Lea Nuhić from the Directorate for European Integration says that a large number of problems were detected within the events organized during Bosnia and Herzegovina’s one-year presidency of the European Strategy for the Adriatic-Ionian region. They can be solved by joint action, first of all, by all levels of government, but also by joint regional projects, and in this way receive funds from the European Union funds.
“The problems detected in all countries participating in the strategy are high youth unemployment and unsustainable youth employment in tourism, and we detected these problems at the round table, and in the future this will be the topic of some projects that will be financed from IPA funds,” she adds.
And the European Union sees regional cooperation as one of the key segments in the enlargement process. This is best illustrated by the fact that in mid-June the Council for General Affairs put macro-regional cooperation as one of the priorities from which all countries can benefit, regardless of the stage of accession to the union.
“It will help us to have concrete aid programs of the European Union in our case when we are talking about the Adriatic Ionian strategy, that is Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and Greece in terms of expertise, interpretation of aquis, transfer of aquis”, believes Midhat Džemić from the Directorate for European Integration of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Whether it is about sustainable tourism, the environment, transport and energy connectivity, the countries of the European Union are ready to help, and it is up to the local authorities to what extent they will use this help. What the tourism potential of Bosnia and Herzegovina really is is shown by the data that in six months of this year BiH broke the record for the number of tourist visits, including the one from 2019, which was the best until then. According to official data, more than 732 thousand tourists visited our country until June.
