September the 8th, 2023 – The Biokovo-Imotski Lakes Geopark has been going from strength to strength in terms of tourism. It is now the UNESCO global geopark list’s latest candidate.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, after five years of negotiations, the Biokovo-Imotski Lakes Geopark is now a candidate for UNESCO’s list of global geoparks. The decision to have it added was made unanimously in Marrakesh, Morocco. Imotski has otherwise continued to very successfully and rapidly climb up the competitive tourist map of Croatia this year, and the results in the first eight months of 2023 are about 10 percent better than they were last year.
The Blue Lake viewpoint was included by the respected British publication The Guardian among the top twenty European pearls to visit this year. There have also been thousands of tourists visiting the area, mostly Germans, Poles and, of course, the English, reports HRT.
When the weather turns a little for the worse, then more tourists go there, explained tourist informant Branko Malić, adding that they mostly come “from the coast because they can’t go swimming there when the weather is poor”.
Imotski’s tourism is on the up
The first of Imotski’s four-star heritage hotels was opened next to the famous Blue Lake not so long ago It is located in the place where there was a lodging house more than a century ago, and each room tells a part of the property’s long history
“We have traces of life going back 4,000 years here. We’ve got stećci (monumental medieval tombstones found frequently across this region), and much more. In addition, we have nature in our surroundings, so we also surrounded ourselves with natural materials – wood, stone, carpets made of ecological materials, and the key cards for our front doors are also made of wood,” said hotelier Davor Pojatina.
The new hotel and now 560 villas and holiday homes dotted around the Imotski area have improved tourist numbers by about 10 percent. More than a third of the guests visiting Imotski at the moment are from elsewhere in Europe – primarily Germans, Brits and Poles, and the surprise of the season have been the Slovenian guests.
“Everything went well this year because last year the local tourist board ran a positive campaign so that everything would go smoothly. Everyone was duly registered and we had nobody trying to avoid registering their guests,” noted Stipe Čelan from the Imotski Tourist Board.
Local wine and gastronomy
Autumn will be all about the local gastronomy and traditional wine evenings. Small winemakers sell everything they produce on the Makarska riviera and in Split, and some still remains for Imotski.
“These aren’t big wineries and they can devote themselves to quality over quantity. We’re very lucky that 90% of our production is native varieties of grapes that are now very much “in” in the wine world”, explained Imotski-based winemaker Stipe Đuzel.
Finally, money is being invested in the infrastructure to make the city better connected by traffic with the tunnel through Biokovo. The long-planned new expressway from the border with neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina to the junction in Zagvozd is still, unfortunately, just an empty promise for now.
With that said, the government should step in with money for the arrangement of the visitor centre in the run-down building of the former tobacco station, where the premises of the future UNESCO Biokovo-Imotski Lakes Geopark will be located.
