There is a village in Slovakia that looks like it stepped out of a fairytale - 45 wooden houses in pastel colours, scattered across a mountain slope, with a wooden bell tower from 1770. It is called Vlkolinec, tucked into the Western Carpathians, about three hours by car from Bratislava. And its residents want it taken off the UNESCO World Heritage list. Yes - they want out.

It sounds backwards until you hear the numbers. The village has around 15 permanent residents, mostly older people. And it takes in roughly 100,000 tourists a year. Do the maths: that is a little over 6,600 visitors per resident. This is not a village - it is a zoo where the exhibits still live inside.

„We have become a zoo,“ said Anton Sabuča, a 68-year-old resident, putting it exactly, and added that the community would live better without the UNESCO label. Tourists climb over fences for photos, peer through windows while people are eating lunch, tramp across private property. The village was listed in 1993 to preserve it - and preservation turned it into a mandatory photo stop, like Hallstatt in Austria or Giethoorn in the Netherlands.

And here is the trap of protection. The label comes with restrictions: you cannot freely renovate a house, extend a garden, keep livestock. Life freezes in the state it was in when the inspectors arrived to register it. The village is kept beautiful for others to look at - while those who live inside are not allowed to adapt it to their own lives.

Getting off the list is nearly impossible. So far it has happened only when a site was permanently destroyed - not because residents asked for peace. The bureaucracy that puts you on the list has no idea how to take you off it. Vlkolinec stays beautiful, sought-after and packed - a village paying the price of its own beauty, in small change, every summer all over again.