First public garage on Kopaonik opens

The Minister of Trade, Tourism and Telecommunications of Serbia, Rasim Ljajic, has opened the first public garage on Kopaonik, which should solve the problem of traffic congestion which this ski center has been facing for decades now.

At the opening of the multi-story garage for the parking of passenger vehicles, with 350 parking spaces, Ljajic said that it was a capital project that Kopaonik needed and the first project of its kind on mountains in Serbia.

He pointed out that the Kopaonik ski-center was expanding its accommodation and infrastructure capacities year after year and that private investments were growing.

He pointed out that there were 15 hotels on the mountain at the moment, half of which are high-category hotels, with four stars, and that, five years before, hotels had usually had two to three stars.

Ljajic said that the PE Ski Resorts of Serbia had done a lot to improve the infrastructure and that Kopaonik had three tracks for night skiing and one for night sledding, with all of them equipped with an artificial snow system.

The project which, according to him, will contribute the most to increasing the number of guests, especially foreign ones, is the construction of a gondola system between Brzece and Kopaonik, that is Mali Karaman, which should begin in early 2020.

The minister said that the gondola would be built with the proceeds from the loan of the European Investment Bank and that the estimated value of the project was EUR 22.5 million without VAT.

As he added, the construction of the gondola will help solve the problem of traffic congestion, but also revive Brzece as a tourist center.

– There are 3,300 beds in Brzece now, four hotels are ready for opening, but the owners don't want to open them as there are no guests due to the problem of reaching Kopaonik. Dozens of buses and hundreds of cars jam this section and it takes an hour to travel twenty kilometers. This will shorten the time to 11 minutes – Ljajic said.

According to him, the construction of the gondola will help prevent the further unfeasible urbanization of the center of Kopaonik.

Ministarstvo turizma i omladine Republike Srbije

Skijališta Srbije Beograd

Mali Karaman

Rasim Ljajić

Kopaonik public garage

gondola Brzeće

ski center Kopaonik

EIB

night skiing

ski tracks Kopaonik

hotels Kopaonik

parking Kopaonik