Deckchairs in Herceg Novi win UNESCO

Once again, for the umpteenth time, I am expressing my personal opinion, which will not be approved by most comments, neither by those who sell, nor by those who invest, nor by those who approve of all this along with legalized corruption, with the recommendation that I deal with myself and that I am against "progress".

The space on the Herceg Novi coast is our common wealth and our future depends on the future of the space. The current state and municipal authorities, as well as the previous ones, are complicit in the destruction of the space on the coast and in the hinterland (Orjen). They forget that the space is shared and that the current personal interest and quick profit for politicians and investors, and especially the "experts"-planners, who prefer their short-term gain to the long-term loss for our descendants. Because, when we build up the entire remaining space, Herceg Novi will lose its current enormous source of income, because we have sold everything most valuable to foreign investors.

We will illustrate the cause-and-effect relationship of spatial devastation using the example of the seashore and Mount Orjen:

- The Orjen Nature Park is supposed to be a protected area where three quarries have been operating so far. However, a new quarry has started operating within the park's borders without being registered or controlled by the responsible authorities in the Municipality. They are all working at full speed, without an environmental impact assessment study that would foresee the remediation of the damage caused to nature in Orjen.

- The Herceg Novi Riviera is an area of ​​greatest importance for the development of the municipality, rapidly changing its landscape appearance due to its extraordinary wealth of natural resources, with enormous construction of apartments for the market. The coastline is currently being aggressively changed by filling in stone and gravel from the Orjen quarries, at several locations for the construction of artificial beaches, which will be the subject of this article, as it is a buffer zone under UNESCO protection.

- In the end, after the profit made from the beaches, all the waste ends up on the mountain that was extremely respected and protected during the Austro-Hungarian rule. Now Orjen looks sad with quarries, the city dump at Ubli, where all the waste from the beaches ends up. The construction waste landfill at Mokrine, where investors deposit waste from family houses that the heirs sold, in order to get 20% of the apartments built. A huge landfill of discarded tires (800 tons). Although I keep repeating myself, I am now torn by a new dilemma - what kind of people are we in Boka, who see the deterioration of the bay and accept it. And the more we keep silent, things get worse - "investors" with huge capital are becoming more and more ruthless in destroying and deteriorating the environment in Boka. The lack of inventiveness and lack of ideas of our domestic, controversial investors, which is reduced only to building condo hotels, apartments, apartments for the market and, of course, artificial beaches, is especially surprising. About the problems of the latter, I wrote 13 years ago (August 13, 2013) in "News", an author's article entitled: "Summer, sea and plastic", which I could rewrite even now, but in a much more drastic form, because everything has been turned into an element, where the main goal is profit.

Last year, there were more than 70 beaches on the Herceg Novi coast, which is 18 km long. This year, several beaches are under construction that will be record-breaking in terms of surface area. On each of these “arranged” beaches, there is a so-called open bar (which is why the beach is rented). Open bars are similar in appearance, most often built of metal construction, covered with plastic awnings. In the hinterland of such temporary catering facilities, most often in the open space, there are temporary warehouses for drinks in (PET) packaging. In front of the open bar there is a terrace with plastic furniture and, most importantly for the tenant, a huge number of plastic deck chairs (50-200). The saddest thing is that after a certain period of time, most of this plastic scalameria will end up on Orjen.

Since most of the newly formed businessmen or so-called beach managers have concluded that this is a simple, fast and very easy way to make money (especially from renting out deck chairs, a set of which costs up to 35 euros), in recent years there has been a real scramble to rent beaches, and enormous prices have been achieved in their bidding. Only those who have connections or large financial resources win. The native population, who have lived in some kind of harmony with their coast for centuries, looks in amazement at these new investors, who came to the coast very late and conquered the centuries-old Boka mentality, and have nothing in common with the sea and the coast. They turn the native population, on the condition that they do not engage in politics, which allows them to get a government job, into - receptionists, waiters, cooks, gardeners, skippers... who work for people of a much lower intellectual level, with dubious capital.

Long ago, on April 22, 2008, a group of experts (Prof. Dr. Zoran Kljajić, Ana Mišurović, Minister of Ecology, Ante Sterniša, MA, and I) in an interview with the weekly magazine "Monitor" entitled "Already seen", regarding the case of sea filling in Lipci, concluded that it is a sin to simply accuse controversial investors, who do not have to experience the beauty of Boka and who are only interested in classic profiteering. Dr. Zoran Kljajić, from the Institute of Marine Biology in Kotor, stated at the time: "According to some bathymetric research conducted by the Institute, the depth of the sea in the bay has decreased by almost a meter in the last three decades." No one has yet calculated how much the bay's water area has been reduced by filling in for the construction of marinas (Tivat, Kumbor, Meljine) and beaches.

Regardless of who the investor is, he is the least guilty, because all the blame lies with the state institutions that allowed violence against nature. At that time, we concluded that the case of the sea filling in Lipci was not the first and that the most drastic case of filling and destruction of the bay occurred during the construction of the Kotor tunnel, when a huge amount of material was deposited in front of the Kotor hospital. This system of filling in the bay continued in Lipci. All this took place under the control of the authorities, even the then mayor “controlled” the progress of the works on filling in the Risan bay twice a day, while leaving and returning from work. This trend of “turning a blind eye” by those responsible continued at several locations on the Herceg Novi Riviera (Bijela, Kumbor, Baošići, Herceg Novi...) where the competent municipal and republican services with the highest state and municipal officials started to control when the work was completed, that is, when they finished the “Mimosa Festival”, promising the gullible people “that everything would return to its original state”.

The author is a senior research associate at the "Dr. Simo Milošević" Institute in Igalo