ZAGREB, October 26, 2018 – The Croatian national parks Kornati, Brijuni and Mljet and the nature parks Lastovo, Telaščica, Vransko Jezero Lake and Žumberak (Samobor Hills) as well as some public institutions have shown interest in the development of the ecologically friendly tourist programmes, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) stated on Friday.
That leading organisation in wildlife conservation said that its cooperation with the Kornati National Park and the Lastovo Nature Park had resulted in the launch of environmentally friendly tourist programmes and services, such as fishing tourism and traditional honey making demonstrations.
These initiatives are part of the DestiMED project, funded by the EU’s MED programme and conducted by the Italian region of Lazio, IUCN Centre for Mediterranean Cooperation, MedPan, Federparchi, WWF Adria, WWF Mediterranean, and the Albanian national agency for protected areas NAPA.
DestiMED “aims at building the pre-conditions for a Mediterranean destination management organisation (DMO) that will harmonise quality standards and tools to monitor compliance, propose attractive ecotourism offers promoted through a lasting brand. Specifically, the project will further develop and test ecotourism standards, offers and monitoring tools in 13 protected areas around the basin – forming the quality scheme of a future DMO. It will build on results of the MEET (Mediterranean Ecotourism Experience) project that created and tested planning and marketing approaches,” reads a text on the DestiMED web site.
In Croatia there are eight national parks and 11 nature parks.