The last pipe has been carried out of the Lešnica valley. That completes the full removal of the pipeline infrastructure that lay for years in one of the most protected areas of the "Šar Planina" National Park - material intended for building two small hydropower plants, "Pena 84" and "Pena 85".

The National Park says the operation did not end with collecting the pipes lying on the surface. The ones that had been buried were dug up too, and carried out of the area entirely. "Today there is no remaining pipeline infrastructure along the route, above or below ground," they say.

Lešnica sits inside the park's strictly protected zone and is due to become part of the future Natura 2000 areas and the Emerald network. So the project meant to cut through it was not planned somewhere on the park's margins - it was planned in its core.

That is the part worth holding on to. Somebody issued the permits. Somebody hauled the pipes up there and buried them. Somebody opened a route through the strictly protected zone of a national park, and all of it passed through institutions that exist precisely to stop this. The removal is only taking this long because the construction happened first.

The park says this is the result of a longer institutional process and coordination with the competent state institutions. That longer process took years, and in the meantime the pipes were part of the landscape. Next comes the restoration of the site and, as they put it, the final institutional closure of the projects - which means that formally they are still not closed.

It is a win. Small, late and expensively paid for, but a win - and one of the kind that rarely happens when water and electricity in the Macedonian mountains are involved. The question left is whether closing these two projects means the next one will not get a permit, or only that this particular one went back to the start.