The media reported on Thursday that the Plitvice Lakes National Park was increasingly close to losing the status of a UNESCO World Heritage Site and that the park's management had still not received a notification on a ban on construction in the park. The ban on construction was one of UNESCO's four demands made to Croatia if it wanted the Plitvice Lakes National Park to remain on the World Heritage Sites list, in which it was included in 1979.
"The Ministry is doing its best to relieve visitor pressure on the Plitvice Lakes National Park and remove UNESCO's objections and it underlines that at the moment, claims that the park is at a risk of being removed from the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites are unfounded," the ministry said, noting that the long-lasting practice of tolerating the excessive exploitation of the park for tourism purposes and excessive construction had jeopardised this protected nature area, about which UNESCO, too, had warned.
The ministry also said that over the past six months it had been working on solving these problems in cooperation with the park's management and the Ministry of Construction and Physical Planning and that it had invited a monitoring mission of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to visit the park and make an assessment of the situation and propose optimal solutions.