Responsible tourism in Slovakia

New budget airlines routes have made Slovakia into a viable skiing destination for more and more Europeans. In 2014, Wizz Air started operating new flights from Luton to Poprad and the nearby resorts, like Jasná, and Štrbské Pleso, quickly became popular pads for powder hounds. As word travels about the good, and relatively cheap, skiing in Slovakia, the surrounding wildlife gets threatened. The average skier doesn’t stop to think about how much intrusive infrastructure downhill skiing brings into a region: those ski runs that you can see from miles away have destroyed natural habitat. Forests were cleared from the mountains to make way for skiing as early as the 1950s, with ancient woodland wiped out on Hrebienok and on the slopes of the famous Lomnický štít. Štrbské Pleso is planning to expand into protected National Park to cope with growing demand from tourists. This controversial decision will involve logging in Tatra National Park, Mlynická Dolina and Furkotská Dolina – two valleys within nature resorts.

What you can do:
Swap downhill skiing for ski touring, which is far less destructive to natural habitats. Stick to high-altitude destinations that don’t rely on snow cannons to create artificial snow, a huge waste of energy and water.

In 2004, a shocking windstorm caused devastation to the heavily wooded slopes of the Tatras Mountains. There were two fatalities, and several villages were cut off. In the immediate aftermath a forest fire raged through the area, too. The damage was far-ranging, and long lasting – not least because the Tatras region is so symbolically important to Slovakia. Some 12,000 hectares, or three million cubic metres, of trees were wiped out, which amounted to 2/3 of the forest on the Tatras slopes. Pictures showed hundreds of thousands of spruce trees, effectively snapped in half by the storms, creating a field of ripped stakes and fallen branches. In the aftermath the world took a magnifying glass to the region, and people criticised the extent of the construction that had been happening, unnoticed, under the trees in the National Park. Well over a decade later, and the destruction is still visible on the mountainside, and will take a long time to recover. However, the shock of the event resonated deeply in Slovakia and might have helped shape environmental policy.

What you can do:
Slovakia has been late to put much thought into environmental policy – but now the fight begins in earnest. In 2017, a movement called Lesy Sme My (‘We are the forest’) united many Slovakians in a campaign against the destruction of forests in national parks.