Serbia is home to a large number of buildings, monuments and nature reserves, some of which protected by UNESCO. About 7,500 square kilometers are registered as national and nature parks. This is in part due to the fact that 30 percent of Serbia’s surface is forested, most of which untouched by man. With so much greenery, accentuating it for tourism stands to reason. The most recent product in this respect is the new fold-up map “Grünes Serbien”, or “Go Green Serbia”, issued by the National Tourism Organization of Serbia.
The flier emphasizes six Serbian regions in particular, including the contact data of the parks: The Tara national park and the upstream part of the river Drina, the so-called “Iron Gate”, a border-crossing national park right and left of the Danube, the nature reserve by the river Uvac, the Stara Planina nature park, as well as the biosphere reserve in the Golija Mountains.
Tara has been a national park in the mountainous region of western Serbia since around 1991, covered with dense forests of mature tree population that make up three quarters of the park and teeming with meadows by rocky cliffs, ravines and caves – in an elevation of 250 to 1,500 meters. The most noteworthy feature is the Pancic spruce that grows up to 50 meters high. It survived the ice age here by the central stretch of the Drina and today grows exclusively on the Tara as an indigenous tree.
The Drina, on the other hand, the largest confluent of the Save and known from the novel “The bridge on the Drina” by Serbian Nobel Price winner Ivo Andric, was once the border between the eastern and western Roman Empire, later between the catholic and the orthodox world, and today between Serbia and Bosnia. While the upstream part is still an untamed mountain river rich in fish, it is regulated downstream by means of reservoirs and power plants, which take the unbridled energy from its currents and transform it – much like how it was done at the so-called “Iron Gate” by the Danube.
Would you have known? Of the overall nine biomes (greater habitats) worldwide, all five European ones converge in Serbia. It is assumed that roughly 39 percent of all European plant species can be found in the national territory of Serbia, as well as 51 percent of European species of fish, 74 percent of all bird species and nearly 68 percent of the local mammal species. 1,600 of the wild species of plants and animals found in Serbia have been deemed of importance internationally, including species threatened by extinction that live (and survive) in the sanctuaries within the country.
