Croatia's Plitvice Lakes National Park welcomes back Chinese tourists: director

PLITVICE LAKES NATIONAL PARK, Croatia, Feb. 13 (Xinhua) -- "We warmly welcome our visitors from China and are looking forward to their return," Tomislav Kovacevic, director of Croatia's Plitvice Lakes National Park, told Xinhua in an interview on Monday.

Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Croatia welcomed 300,000 and the park around 50,000 Chinese tourists per year. However, during the pandemic years the number of visitors to the park dropped to around 1,000 per annum. Most of them arrived from Europe.

In the pre-pandemic period, the total number of visitors to the park exceeded one million per year, making it the country's most popular tourist attraction, Kovacevic said.

The decision by China to reopen its borders and lift the restrictions on travel has opened up new vistas for Croatia and for all other tourism-oriented countries in the world, he said.

The Plitvice Lakes National Park has been very popular among Chinese tourists, whom the director described as "very disciplined and pleasant visitors."

The park had signed cooperation agreements with several Chinese provinces before the pandemic and "we hope that bilateral tourism cooperation will resume as the pandemic is coming to an end," Kovacevic said.

In 1979, the Plitvice Lakes National Park was inscribed on the World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), recognizing its series of picturesque waterfalls, lakes and caves.