2027-01-31 · about 1 min read
How the park came to exist
The declaration of 15 March 2023 names its authors: the Albanian Government together with IUCN, Patagonia, the Save the Blue Heart of Europe campaign NGOs and more than 30 specialists.
That campaign ran for years against a wave of planned hydropower on the river, and valley communities were part of it. The sourced sentence is the coalition; the years of local pressure behind it are the context we state as context, not as a sourced statistic.
Stewardship after the declaration
The park became operational in Phase I by early 2024, with Phase II planned to add the tributaries. Keeping that protection real on the ground — monitoring, clean-ups, local rules of use — is ongoing work in the valley's towns, and it is work we describe, not quantify.
No program names, no membership figures: our source record does not carry them.
Where a careful visitor fits
The visitor's role in that stewardship is ordinary and concrete: local arrangements over anonymous ones, leave-no-trace discipline on the gravel bars, and attention to the nesting-season constraints the river itself imposes. Nothing about that needs exaggerating.
Read next: what protection made possible
The declaration's own figures are in the sourced numbers; the ecology that protection carries is in the biodiversity note.