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Prince Charles' visit to Danube Delta a signal awaited by tour operators
The tour operators in Tulcea County (easternmost part of Romania) hope that the Prince of Wales' visit to the Danube Delta will send a positive signal to tourists that hesitate to visit this natural reserve due to the unstable context in the Black Sea region.
'Prince Charles' visit will definitely be a very favourable signal for tourism in the Danube Delta, especially in the current context. Everybody avoids holyday travels in politically or socially unstable areas,' Europolis Company Manager Victor Iancu told Agerpres.
He added that besides tourist exchanges already cancelled for April and May, there are indications that cruise ships traveling in the Delta will carry up to one-third fewer tourists than normally.
According to Iancu, four river cruise ships have anchored so far in the Port of Tulcea; the first one arrived there on March 31.
'In other news, I can tell you that the Jean Bart Theatre Hall was rented on Thursday night for a group of 50 German and Austrian tourists who came to Tulcea in river cruise ship; it hosted a classic music recital sustained by tourists themselves,' Iancu said.
Last month, the manager of the Europolis Company had announced that four passenger exchanges, involving 1,000 tourists, had cancelled their arrivals in the Danube Delta due to the situation in Ukraine.
Last year, the Tulcea County Council and the Ministry of Tourism invited Charles, Prince of Wales to the Danube Delta, following the plan to this effect announced by a journalist of the Travel Channel who filmed the second season of the 'Wild Carpathia - From the Mountains to the Sea' documentary in 2012.
The Danube Delta is the 22nd in the world in terms of surface area, with 580,000 hectares, equivalent to 2.5 percent of Romania's total area; in Europe, it comes third after the Volga and Kuban Deltas. It is one of the largest wetlands in the world, a natural habitat of aquatic birds, and it has the widest compact reed beds.
With 30 types of ecosystems and nearly 7,400 fauna and flora species identified so far, including 38 previously unknown to scientists, the Danube Delta is considered, according to some authorities, a natural gene bank of inestimable value for the universal natural heritage.
It is the third area of the world in terms of biodiversity, next only to Australia's Great Barrier Reef and Ecuador's Galapagos Islands. The universal value of the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve has been acknowledged by its inclusion in the World Network of Biosphere Reserves in 1990, within the Man and the Biosphere Programme of UNESCO.