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A visit to the Bicaj canyons
Nature has been very generous to us Albanians. In so little territory, it has given us so many fairy tales, which, sadly, we have not known how to pass on properly. In some areas, our country’s landscape now resembles a fairy tale learned wrong: its main meaning has been lost, and so it no longer seems beautiful at all.
That was the feeling my latest visit left me with, in a place that should have been a jewel of nature.
For the weekend, I chose to go to the Bicaj canyons in Kukës, a place I had last visited around 5 years earlier. But what I saw was saddening.
All kinds of rubbish dumped in the watercourse at the entrance to the canyon. “What the hell did they need oil bottles for out here?!” I asked myself angrily, stunned by the bubbling heaps on the river’s current.
For anyone who does not know, the Bicaj canyons are also known as “Shkalla e keqe”, the Bad Pass. They lie on the southern side of Mount Gjallica and are one of Kukës’s natural “jewels”. Locals call them this because, along the 2.5 kilometres where the canyon separates Gjallica from Mount Kolesian, rocks often fall, while the river’s flow changes very quickly: a little rain is enough.
The gap is among the narrowest of the country’s canyons, at 4–6 metres, and its slopes rise to more than 1,000 metres.
Poverty and opportunities for development
But why is this jewel of nature in such a state? Why do the residents pollute it, and why do they not use it for tourism?
These questions have gripped me all week. What are the reasons?
Kukës is the poorest city in Albania. INSTAT says its residents’ annual income does not exceed 320,000 lek. The northeastern district has few economic resources, and the lack of prospects has driven the region’s young people to emigrate en masse in recent years.
Time and again, we were told that major infrastructure projects such as the airport or the Durrës–Kukës–Morinë motorway would bring development to the area. But that development never came, and the chances are it never will.
The airport has not opened. Since 2004, when Emir Zayed, who inaugurated it, died, a strip of land around 4 kilometres long has remained fenced off with wire, and that is all. Meanwhile, the so-called motorway skirts the right-hand side of the city as soon as it crosses the lake, and in a few months you will have to pay to use it.
So Kukës, and the surrounding villages too, are like ghosts. A USAID project once described the people of Kukës as “the happiest in Albania”, but the results of that study were probably more a reflection of the residents’ irony than of reality.
Disappointment, economic despair and difficult living conditions lead rural residents to see even natural monuments such as “Shkalla e keqe” as worthless.
Waste management and tourism
“OK”! Fine, but that does not justify pollution. Why do they pollute nature?
If you visit Kukës, it takes very little time to realise that the capacity to intervene is limited because investment is minimal. Waste management in rural areas has been and remains problematic, while there is no plan of any kind to give residents hope that tourism and nature could provide a decent income and a good living.
Voskopojë, Theth and Valbona are the nearest models, and it would not take much to apply them. Why are they not applied to an area as poor as Kukës? I am sure everyone would want to visit Shkalla e keqe, the Vanave Gorge, Mount Gjallica, Kroi i Kuq and, further afield, villages such as Shishtavec or Novosejë. But not like this…
As I wrote these lines and glanced through the photographs, a wave of pessimism overwhelmed me.
Tourism development begins with education of the population. But when you see Bicaj’s village school being eaten into on every side by a cancerous quarry, you are bitterly assured that the environmental damage will not stop because, sadly, what takes priority in this country is “un-education”… 