The real debate about Bansko

The life of Bansko residents is directly connected to the mountains - 60% of the municipality's economy is tourism, restaurants and entertainment and sports sectors. Nearly 47% of the workers find a living in these economic activities, with even the next largest employers (the furniture industry) and agriculture having a connection to the location of Bansko and Dobrinishte and the other settlements.

The tourism sector in Bansko is thriving

Overnight stays in the Bansko municipality have doubled from the beginning of the crisis in 2008 to 2016, reaching over 315 thousand. Accordingly, revenues from these overnight stays increased from 16.3 million in 2008 to 28-29 million in the period 2013-2015 - from them, foreigners generate 1.8 times more revenue than domestic tourists.

That is, the opposite of what some environmentalists see - we can hardly say that the tourism business is "bankrupt" due to the inflation of some imaginary bubble. In fact, in the last season alone, there was a 34% jump in overnight stays - there is hardly a business that would not want a 1/3 increase in its turnover.

All of this is the context we never hear when the eternal debate about a second lift in Bansko opens. We don't hear that the resort is becoming increasingly popular, creating prosperity for the region, creating jobs and thus retaining population in the municipality and is practically a model for how we can have development outside of the big Bulgarian cities.

Thanks to the mountains and tourism, in a geographically limited region of the Bulgarian countryside, we have small towns that do not resemble the infamous Northwest. In order to continue its development, it is important for the Bansko resort to attract more affluent tourists, who, as statistics show, are mainly foreigners. We can certainly note that things like unfinished construction and service problems hardly help such a goal and these are problems that those who have invested in services such as winter sports and hospitality themselves must solve.

At the same time, we cannot ignore the fact that no one wants to spend their vacation waiting 1-2-3 hours in line to do the main thing they came for - skiing. Anyone accustomed to Austrian or other European mountains, which have an abundance of lifts, would like to come to the Balkans and hang out, sitting in one place, in the winter.

Do we want Bansko to continue developing or not?

The battle between the two sides (for and against the construction) has reached the absurd situation of exhaustion of arguments on the merits. There is no lift project that can be evaluated, discussed, put through impact assessments, through expert opinions of state institutions and environmentalists from the non-governmental sector. This is because the changes in the old and new management plans are blocked politically and judicially, to a situation where no investor can offer anything for consideration.

If the opponents of the lift want to continue with the administrative blocking of the projects forever, then it is a completely different debate, not the one that has been going on so far. We can call it – for or against sealing the mountain in its current state.

We will not interfere with the ecological integrity of the ski area, we will not interfere with the economic sense of the second lift, we will not interfere with the question of who and what the concessionaire is. All these topics are relevant only if someone can even propose a lift project and winter tourism will develop. And so it is logical, if we have decided to end the human presence in the mountains, there is no point in making detours and maneuvering – we directly tell ourselves that this is the maximum development we want in Pirin and no more hotels, foreigners and overnight stays.

However, such a debate is not led and not won by green activists, a small group of people cannot simply decide that this will be the maximum capacity of the resort and play games with Bansko residents, athletes and tourists. Either we stop the chatter and allow proposals for the construction of sports infrastructure at all, or we have a real debate for and against sealing Bansko in its current form.

Image source: Kanal3.bg

The article was originally published on Vesti.bg

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