In terms of tourism, 2023 was an extremely good year in Jajce. According to the information we receive from the Public Institution Agency for Cultural-Historical and Natural Heritage and Development of Tourist Potentials of the City of Jajce, the number of tourists is higher than in 2022, which means that we have surpassed the best year, 2019. Edin Hozan, the Mayor of Jajce Municipality, said this in an interview for Visit BiH Magazine.
– So, from that side we can be very satisfied and hope for a greater number of visits and overnight stays by the end of the year. The events that marked November attracted a significant number of tourists and all our hotel capacities were full, so we can talk about a very successful year when it comes to tourism in Jajce. We can only expect this trend to continue, to expect only better results in the coming years – emphasizes Hozan.
Jajce is recognized as a city that organizes a large number of cultural, sports and other events that attract a large number of tourists. Are you satisfied with the events held and the number of visitors?
– Jajce was full of events this year, and I sort of divide them into three groups – cultural, sports and tourist-entertainment events. Of course, there are our regular ones, which are very important to us, which start with Plivska omaha, continue with Theater games, Jumps from the Pliva waterfall, through Šop’s days to AVNOJ Days. There are Days of the Middle Ages, and the Desant na Jajce event, which was created during the coronavirus pandemic and opened the door for numerous musicians to perform at attractive locations in the city, from the Waterfall plateau to the Fortress, and the projection of the best films of the Sarajevo Film Festival, which is our good partner in recent years. We also had plenty of new content enriched by numerous concerts of local and foreign music stars. All these are events that made it possible to attract many tourists to our city. We can say that we are satisfied. However, more and better can always be done and we will certainly, in the coming period, together with our public institutions and companies, do everything to have more of such events and manifestations.
Do you have statistical data on the number of visits to Jajce in 2023?
– It is difficult to talk about the exact number of visits, because we do not have parameters, we do not have a mechanism based on which we could say exactly what the number of visits is. For now, this is the data of our Agency, which collects tickets at the most visited place, which is our Pliva waterfall. The number of tickets could be an indicative number of visits to Jajce, as it seems that more than 70 percent of tourists visit the Waterfall. Add to that the 30 percent who visit other places (Mlinčići, Tvrđava, museums…). Of course, it is difficult to say precisely although, according to information from the Agency, by the end of August the number of visits exceeded last year’s indicators. But, given that we had events in September, October, November, and now December also offers new content, the expectations are that this year’s number of visits will surpass the very successful 2022. We can state, according to the information of the Agency for Cultural-Historical and Natural Heritage and Development of Tourist Potentials of the City of Jajce, that this year has broken all records, and by the end of the year it is expected that the final number of visits will exceed 140,000.
In recent years, the municipality has been extremely active when it comes to infrastructure works that improve the general image of Jajce. Was it the same in 2023? Can you list some highlights?
– In 2023, we had several active contracts that concerned the construction of local infrastructure, primarily water supply. We are in the final phase of a large project in the field of water supply and wastewater drainage Watsan. We also managed to realize two large projects worth two million marks. We have improved one local road to a significant extent, and the other is under construction. We are nearing the end of the construction of the bridge over the Pliva River in the Mračaj locality and we hope that it will be in operation by the end of 2023, although its final completion is expected in the following year with the construction of a roundabout and environmental landscaping.
The municipality of Jajce leads the way in supporting young people and their businesses. Were there any such activities in 2023, how much money was allocated and how many businesses were supported?
– In previous years, we significantly helped young people through a project, to support their business ideas, and we can boast of a large number of successful businesses that emerged from that program. A significant number of them are still very active today, and I would say that they are already moving into serious businesses in the city, employing a large number of workers. The project “Best business ideas for young people” generated support for 71 ideas in seven years, and the Municipality of Jajce supported them with 550,000 BAM in grants. This year, we paused that program a bit, and gave priority to another project that was valuable in previous years. It is a support program for the establishment of small businesses and self-employment in agriculture with the aim of employing the elderly population. Here, our desire was to provide support to a difficult-to-employ category of the population so that they, through their own work and self-employment, could provide themselves with one year of work experience. In this way, our fellow citizens, those who are a year or two away from retirement, would exercise that right to receive pension. The municipality of Jajce, through this project, supported them. When it comes to young people, we will definitely continue our business idea in the coming years, because we think it is a very useful program. Of course, this is not the only way we support young people. A special program that we are implementing for the second year is the support program for subsidizing the first housing for young people. The municipality of Jajce thus helps its fellow citizens to take care of housing and is currently running a financial support program of 7,000 BAM in the net amount for young people who are buying real estate, a house, an apartment or building a house for the first time. In these two years, we allocated 380,000 BAM for this project. We also have allocations for scholarships, we reward the best students, we have a project to employ volunteers with a university degree within a one-year experience gaining, and we are especially proud of our already eight-year old program of support for mothers in labor, i.e. a cash gift for each new-born baby. Through this program, we allocated more than 730,000 BAM in eight years. In 2023 alone, we invested almost 80,000 BAM in monetary gifts for newborn babies. We believe that the Municipality of Jajce is sensitive to its young people and their needs.
In the past 17 years, almost 2.8 million have been set aside for scholarships from the budget of the Municipality of Jajce, which has awarded almost 2,800 scholarships. How many students did you grant scholarships in 2023 and in what amount, and do you plan to do the same in 2024?
– The Municipality of Jajce has been allocating funds for scholarships to good and successful students from the area of the municipality of Jajce. For the past 18 years almost 3,000 scholarships were awarded and almost three million were allocated from the Budget for the purpose of scholarships. 94 students received a scholarship in the 2022/2023 school year. Jajce is one of the few places in BiH that pays its scholarship holders, upon signing the contract, a scholarship in the total amount of 1,000 BAM each. In 2023, we had a small drop in applicants. Analyzes show that this is a generation that made the transition from eight to nine-year primary education.
Jajce welcomes visitors with new events, plans and projects. What can we expect in 2024, in terms of improving the tourist offer?
– I believe that in the coming period we will have even more manifestations and events that will have an exclusively entertaining and touristic character. First of all, I am thinking of cultural, sports, and even some exclusively entertaining events, such as concerts by performers that can attract an audience to Jajce, and we will certainly work on that. What I want to emphasize here is that, in order to improve the tourist offer, the municipality of Jajce should create conditions for investing in tourism from the real, i.e. private sector, and all of us who deal with city development planning have agreed that we lack hotel accommodation facilities in the city, hotels of the highest categories. For this reason, we will try to create conditions for the construction of new hotels in the future. I am sure that such an investment would benefit the city in every sense.
I also want to announce new investments in 2024. This is, first of all, the beginning of the construction of the Mračaj stadium, that is, one part of it. It is an auxiliary stadium that should be a whole that will enable our football clubs to play their matches of any level of competition in Jajce. In addition, our plan is to complete the Lug-Lendići football stadium for the needs of the Dnoluka Football Club, which exists in the area, but it would also be a sports field for the residents of that area. This would also relieve the Mračaj stadium, because we have three clubs in Jajce and they need more fields for training and playing.
Our goal is also to renovate the devastated kindergarten “Naša radost”, the first phase of which is already nearing completion.
Of course, the construction of local roads and city streets is our task in 2024 as well. Here I highlight the completion of the bridge over the Pliva River in the Mračaj locality, with the construction of a roundabout on Stjepana Tomašević Street and its complete reconstruction from the roundabout near the Turist Hotel to the junction with Plivska jezera Street. This is something that is very important to us, and we will try to secure all the necessary funds for the year 2024 in order to realize this as well.
