‘A historic opportunity’: huge new national park to become one of Europe’s largest

The Shar Mountain national park straddling North Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania will be the ‘missing piece for protected areas in the Balkans’

The region’s biodiversity is especially impressive but decades of illegal logging in the forests have left erosion-scarred landscapes

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Poppies bloom on a hillside of the mighty Shar Mountain, which will soon be protected in a vast trans-boundary area and be proclaimed a national park. Photo: AP

Published: 5:15pm, 28 Jun 2021Updated: 5:15pm, 28 Jun 2021

After decades of being exploited by loggers, a vast, cross-border area of breathtaking beauty in the Balkans centred on Shar Mountain is close to becoming a national park, one of the largest in Europe.

North Macedonian lawmakers are expected to soon pass a bill granting Shar Mountain that status. The area of over 240,000 hectares (593,000 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 myriad grey-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 Green Belt has been endangered for years.

Anela Stavrevska-Panajotova of the International Union for Conservation of Nature shows a map of the new national park during a press briefing on Shar Mountain, North Macedonia, on June 9, 2021. Photo: EPA-EFE

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.