Foreign hunters shoot Balkan chamois on the rocks above Mavrovo and then, as a ritual, drink the blood of the animal they killed. The footage has been posted on hunting channels on social media. Part of the material also shows a vehicle bearing National Park markings.

Packages on the European market run from three to six thousand euros per chamois shot, depending on the trophy value of the horns. That is not a black-market figure - it is the price of a product sold openly.

A protected species, a legal permit

The Macedonian Ecological Society points out that the Balkan chamois is a strictly protected species under the Bern Convention and under the European Union's Habitats Directive. Their field monitoring shows the Mavrovo population is under constant pressure.

And yet the hunting is legal. The park's director, Haris Ibraimi, explains that the culling is part of a Breeding Measures Programme approved by the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture, through which the health of the wildlife is monitored. The hunting is done by hunting associations that register with the park, accompanied by a ranger.

Those funds, the park says, pay for routine maintenance and the salaries of the ranger service. So the park pays its rangers out of the sale of the animals those rangers are supposed to be guarding.

A legal vacuum fifteen years long

The 2004 Nature Protection Act required every protected area to be re-designated by 2010. Mavrovo is the only national park in the country still not re-designated by law; it has no Management Plan and no Forest Habitats Programme.

The first Revalorisation Study was produced between 2011 and 2013. A law was drafted in 2015, the text was published on the ENER portal - and was then withdrawn by the government with no explanation.

A new Study, partly funded from the state budget, was completed in December 2023. Under it, more than half the park's area would become a zone of strict protection and active management - an increase of over 20 percent in the most strictly protected sections compared with the 2012 document. New outer boundaries were also established, expanding the park by more than 1,000 hectares.

The Study was accepted and endorsed by experts, local authorities and residents. The park's current management does not accept it. So the process is stuck.

What is inside

Research carried out for the Study in 2023 confirmed the presence of 14 Balkan lynx - a species numbering around fifty individuals in total and among the closest to extinction. There are also 130 bears, a stable wolf population, one of the largest populations of the scarce copper butterfly, and the largest natural population of wild chestnut with a great many century-old trees. Forest cover has grown from 30,600 to 36,200 hectares.

Letters with no reply

"Twenty civil society organisations sent a letter to the government and the ministry calling for the re-designation procedure for Mavrovo National Park to resume urgently, but so far we have had no response at all," says Ana Čolović-Lešoska of Eko-svest.

Marko Gučeski, a lawyer at the same organisation, explains the mechanism: "There has to be a National Park Act, because the management plan and programme for the national park have to flow from it."

The issue is being tracked internationally as well. Under the Bern Convention, protection of Mavrovo has been monitored since 2013, and in 2025 a specific recommendation was sent to the Macedonian authorities to halt hydropower development and re-designate the park urgently. Since last year there has been no communication between the Convention Secretariat and the Ministry of Environment.

The Bern Convention also asked for the small hydropower plants in Mavrovo to be abandoned. The concession for the Ribnička plant has not been terminated - the procedure is still running.

The demand

Conservationists want the government to stop chamois hunting tourism in the park until a strict protection regime is in place, and to declare a moratorium on activities that do not serve nature protection.

Until then, every month that passes without a law means a few more legal permits, a few thousand more euros in the park's budget, and a few more videos in which Macedonian nature is presented to the world as an offer.