100 Years of Protected Status for the Triglav National Park

Anniversaries

Conservation equals survival – 100 years of the Triglav National Park

The world’s first national park, Yellowstone National Park in the western United States, was created in 1872. The oldest national park in Europe is found in Sweden, where Abisko National Park was founded in the north of the country in 1909. The oldest national park in the Alps is the Swiss National Park (1914).

Efforts to create a national park in Slovenia coincide quite closely with the latter two dates. The seismologist Albin Belar had proposed the protection of the Valley of the Triglav Lakes in as early as 1908, but disputes over pasturing and the outbreak of the First World War meant that his proposal did not prosper.

After the war, the Nature Conservation and Natural Monuments Section of the Museum Society of Slovenia drew up Slovenia’s first nature conservation programme, called the Memorandum (1920), which also revived Belar’s idea. On 1 July 1924, following years of unremitting effort, protected status was granted to an area of 1,400 hectares in the Valley of the Triglav Lakes. This protection was made possible by the signing of a twenty-year lease agreement between the Directorate of Forests in Ljubljana, which managed the property on behalf of its owner, the Catholic Church, and the two organisations promoting the creation of the park – the Museum Society of Slovenia and the Slovene Alpine Club. To begin with, the newly created protected area was known as the Alpine Conservation Park. In 1926, however, in an article in the daily newspaper Jutro, the botanist Fran Jesenko proudly referred to it as the Triglav National Park – and the name stuck.

The park was subsequently enlarged three times (1961, 1981, 2010) and today has an area of almost 84,000 hectares, as defined under the Triglav National Park Act.

Marjeta Albinini,

Triglav National Park