Time for the Wild Beauty: Hunting and Game Watching

Macedonia is a country with a varied landscape including valleys, ravines, and plateaux, but it is the high mountains, some of them reaching 2800 m above sea level, that dominate the landscape. They are rich in forests and running waters. Wild animals like muflons, chamois, wild boars, different kinds of deer (fallow, roe and ordinary deer) and wild goats find ideal habitats there. Lowlands and rolling hills are populated by smaller species like wild geese, rabbit, wild goat, bear, and pheasant. This constitutes a great potential for the development of hunting tourism. The growth of investments in this field has lead to an increase in services and improvement of the overall care for wild animals. This made Macedonia double its number of hunters from 20 000 in 2005 to 40 000 in 2014, many of them being international tourists. Macedonia has a rich hunting tradition. In Antiquity and the Middle Ages it was a territory with many noble families, royalty and high state officials, whose most popular sport was hunting. Even in the socialist times hunting was organized as a prestigious hobby for high-ranking party and state officials. Read more…