North Macedonia ready to create huge new national park

POPOVA SHAPKA, North Macedonia (AP) — After decades of being exploited by loggers, a vast, cross-border area of breathtaking beauty in the Balkans centered on Shar Mountain is close to becoming a national park, one of the largest in Europe.

North Macedonian lawmakers are expected to shortly pass a bill granting Shar Mountain that status. The area of over 240,000 hectares (593,053 acres) that ranges through Albania, North Macedonia and Kosovo is a treasure of natural beauty and diverse and unique wildlife.

Shar Mountain has 37 glacial lakes, 25 of them in North Macedonia and the rest in Kosovo, which glint in the mountain's folds like a myriad of gray-green eyes scanning the skies.

Especially impressive is the region's biodiversity, which counts 200 endemic plant species, 167 species of butterflies, 12 of amphibians, 18 of reptiles, 130 of birds and 45 of mammals. That is almost half of the total number of mammal species in North Macedonia.

But the idyll on the Balkan’s Green Belt has been endangered for years.

Decades of illegal logging in the forests have left erosion-scarred landscapes, especially in the more densely populated lower slopes of Shar Mountain, which locals have used for free farming, hunting, fuel and timber. Over the past two decades, North Macedonia has lost about 40,000 hectares of forest to illegal logging, authorities say.

Anela Stavrevska-Panajotova, an International Union for Conservation of Nature expert, says the country is witnessing “a historic opportunity, after 60 years, to have a new national park, which is the missing piece for protected areas in the Balkans.”

“Together with other protected areas in other neighboring countries, we will have the largest trans-boundary protected area in all of Europe. And we are very proud about it!” she...