The devastation of the sea that occurred in Baošići, where, under the justification of a building permit issued by the Municipality of Herceg Novi and a contract for the construction of an investment beach with the Seaside Development Agency, the company Carine dumped 14.500 square meters of earth, stone and sand into the sea to form a new hotel beach, is a shame for all institutions, the local community, but also the entire Montenegrin society.
This was heard at the panel discussion "Integrating Policy, Science and Community in Coastal Management" held in Tivat as part of the two-day scientific conference "Boka Kotorska as a Sustainable Nautical Destination". The conference was organized as part of the "Wind Festival 2026" held in the towns of Boka Bay by the Delfin Sailing Club from Tivat, the Faculty of Maritime Affairs of the University of Montenegro and the Institute of Marine Biology from Kotor. Its second part - the panel "UNESCO and the Future of Cruising in Boka Bay" dedicated to issues of maritime safety and sustainable cruising tourism in the bay, will be held today in Kotor.
"I am personally ashamed of this, even though the department I work in did not participate in reaching such an opinion," said Ivana Mitrović, an independent advisor for the marine ecosystem at the Montenegrin Nature Protection Agency (EPA), when asked to comment on the fact that on the last day of last year, the EPA issued a decision determining that the controversial project of filling thousands of square meters of sea in Baošići by the company Carine allegedly did not require the preparation of an Environmental Impact Assessment Study.
This personal stance of hers was greeted with applause by the panelists and the audience, which included representatives of domestic and foreign institutions dealing with the protection of the sea and nature, the academic community, local authorities, the non-governmental sector, and citizens.
"In the current spatial planning documentation for that part of the coast, there is no basis for such a drastic intervention in the space, but rather clear guidelines on what can and must be done on the coast. I find it truly inexplicable and shameful how what happened to Baošiži could have happened in this way," commented spatial planner Saša Karajović, who is one of the authors of the current Special Purpose Spatial Plan for the coastal area of Montenegro.
Coordinator for Nature and Environmental Protection at JP Morsko dobro, Nemanja Malovrazić, assessed that the current Regulation on Projects Requirement of an Impact Assessment Study gives the EPA a clear opportunity and obligation to order investors to prepare these studies not only for the intervention carried out in the sea in Baošići, but also for all other often controversial interventions in the public sphere of "fertilizing" and filling beaches before the start of the bathing season, which, due to their undeniable ecological harm, are met with unanimous condemnation by the local population, fishermen and experts in the marine ecosystem.
Due to the controversial filling of the sea in Baošići and the illegal construction of part of a mammoth hotel on the coast, the Basic State Prosecutor's Office in Herceg Novi is conducting an investigation, and the owner of the company Carine, Podgorica businessman Čedo Popović and the Secretary for Urban Planning of the Municipality of Herceg Novi Vladislav Velaš were arrested for this, but have since been released. The competent state authorities have sealed the disputed construction sites in Baošići, and the Administration for the Protection of Cultural Heritage has ordered Customs to return the devastated coast to its previous state, which the Podgorica company has not complied with so far, just as Morsko dobro has not yet terminated the contract with Customs for the construction of an investment beach in Baošići, which Prime Minister Milojko Spajić announced would happen.
The participants of the panel in Tivat agreed that there are numerous challenges in the way the state manages its own coast and inefficiently responds to the increasingly frequent spatial and ecological devastation in this sensitive but also the most valuable part of Montenegro in general.
As we have heard, regular monitoring of the state of the environment in the marine ecosystem, which is a legal obligation, is not carried out regularly or with high quality, spatial plans and other strategic documents are most often produced with high quality, but are not applied or respected in practice, while decision-makers in the state administration system most often do not pay attention to various documents and expert assessments that scientists work on and which are most often of excellent quality, because these documents are not binding on them and investors at all.
"Unfortunately, experience has taught us that most often an investor equals devastation, but this does not have to be the case at all if we respect the profession, plans and local communities that know the situation and opportunities on the ground in certain areas best. As long as the local community is not respected and as long as its needs are not respected above all, there is no question of sustainable development. Culture, education and science are on their knees here, and everywhere else in the world, these are the most powerful weapons in the hands of a society," stressed Milica Mandić from the Institute of Marine Biology.
Institute Director Mirko Đurović said that science and the local community should be the ones to "give politicians guidelines on what needs to be done", and that the local community "should fight more for its rights and its living space", which, according to him, was neither seen nor happened in the case of the residents of Baošić.
"All our public and development policies are much more oriented towards tourism, which undoubtedly brings great economic benefits, but it also brings with it some ugly phenomena and devastation in space," he pointed out, adding that decision-makers must take more account of the position of science and the local population when it comes to finding the optimal balance and respecting the limits of the carrying capacity of a sensitive destination such as Boka for excessive tourist exploitation of that region.
"There used to be a lot of politics in spatial planning, but today it has become big business. Not all growth and growth at any cost is necessarily development in the true sense of the word," warned Saša Karajović from MonteCEP, adding that the number of permanent residents in the three municipalities of Boka Bay remained approximately at the same level between the two censuses, while at the same time there was a huge increase in the number of apartments being sold or rented, which is not sustainable tourist development of a destination. He pointed out that all relevant planning documents have adopted and applied on paper the principles of the Barcelona Convention on the distance of any new construction of at least 100 meters from the coast, as well as that only tourist facilities can be built within a zone of 1.000 meters from the sea, but not new residential settlements, but that in practice this is not respected or applied at all by decision-makers.
The Head of the Department for Marine and Coastal Ecosystems at the Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Northern Development, Milica Rudić, stated that "at the horizontal level between ministries and state services" everything is functioning properly and that there are no difficulties in implementing plans and postulates of sustainable development, and that the biggest cause of the problems we have with the devastation of coastal areas is most often the limited administrative capacities of local governments to control and implement it in the field, as well as the insufficient capacities of inspections.
However, when asked by the panel members, she admitted that the Ministry's Environmental Inspection did not intervene at all during the devastation in Baošići, which involved dumping thousands of tons of rocks, soil and sand into the sea, because, as she said, that area falls primarily under the cultural heritage protection regime, so according to her, the inspection for the protection of cultural property was primarily responsible for reacting, and it did act and imposed a ban on further work.
In her address, Slavica Petović from the Institute of Marine Biology spoke about the need to preserve the natural values of Boka Kotorska and a responsible attitude towards the space on land and at sea, which is exposed to enormous anthropological pressure.
"Boka represents a place of infinite beauty. A place where the wind meets the sea, where the past meets the future. I hope that this conference will be a roadmap for how Boka will remain green and blue and preserved for all future generations," she concluded.
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