Over the hill, over the top

Until recently, residents of this central Bosnian town never gave Visocica hill much thought.

Roughly pyramid-shaped and covered in woods, Visocica loomed 720ft above the town. Occasionally, tourists or picnic parties would drive up the dirt track to take in the scenery or to poke about the ruins of the medieval castle on its summit. Most of the time it was left to the sheep.

But over the past year and a half, this sleepy town of 12,000 has become one of Bosnia's busiest tourist destinations, with thousands of visitors coming every day in summer to see what is purported to be the world's largest pyramid. Four more purported pyramids are scattered around Visoko, disguised as hills.

Reviving tourism

Foreign geological experts who have visited the site say it is a natural hill, and the archaeological community in Bosnia has condemned ongoing digs as a waste of the nation's limited resources and a threat to real sites. But for many Bosnians, it is a tourism dream come true.

"It's a big affirmation for the town, because everyone hears the name Visoko," says Mayor Munib Alibegovic. "Suddenly, we have economic movement and lots of tourists coming here."

Twelve years after the end of the 1992-95 war, Bosnia's tourism industry is slowly coming back to life, and not only in Visoko. Sarajevo and Mostar have become popular summer side trips for the throngs of Italian, French and German tourists who spend their holidays on Croatia's Adriatic coast. Serbs, Croats and Montenegrins crowd the slopes of the country's ski resorts.

Land with promise

In the Croat-Bosniak Federation (one of the country's two states within a state), hotel stays by foreign tourists have risen 69 per cent since 2003. The other half of the country, Republika Srpska, has seen more modest growth, in part because it suffered less physical damage during the war and, therefore, began attracting visitors earlier, many of them from neighbouring Serbia.

"For a long time after the war, we had humanitarian workers and consultants, but now it's mostly tourists," says Valida Vilic, who runs Halvat Guesthouse in the oldest part of Sarajevo, called Bascarsija, whose Ottoman-era mosques, squares and market hall are popular with visitors.

"But they stay just for a day or two."

Bosnia's leaders hope tourism will bring jobs to this war-ravaged country, where the official unemployment rate exceeds 40 per cent.

An advertising campaign urges viewers: "Enjoy Bosnia and Herzegovina", while glossy new brochures from the tourist board invite people to visit the historic towns and untrammelled nature in the "Heart Shaped Land."

"Tourism can be the key to transforming Bosnia and Herzegovina," the senior international official, High Representative Christian Schwarz-Schilling, wrote in a Sarajevo newspaper editorial recently.

As with most things in Bosnia, there is no national strategy for tourism, but 11 of them: one for Republika Srpska and one for each of the Croat-Bosniak Feder-ation's ten cantons. There is little trust among the country's Serb, Croat and Bosniak (or "Bosnian Muslim") politicians, complicating efforts to create a common strategy aimed at promoting tourism and improving infrastructure.

"There is no tourism strategy," says Tim Clancy, a co-founder of Green Visions, a Sarajevo-based non-profit organisation that promotes sustainable tourism programmes. "This is not a mass tourism destination like Croatia, so we need to focus on quality, not quantity."

Not mass tourism

Bosnia also has an image problem, as it is still widely associated with ethnic cleansing, atrocities against civilians and the siege of Sarajevo. While Sarajevo and other cities have been largely repaired and rebuilt, war-damaged buildings are still a common sight, as are the red skull-and-crossbones signs warning of the presence of mine fields.

Many tourists visiting Bosnia come because of the war, notes guide Zijad Jusufovic, whose "Mission: Impossible" tour of Sarajevo's wartime sites is by far and away the most popular of his excursions.

"I started with historic walking tours of the city, but more and more people kept asking about the war and the siege," he says.

"They are impressed with how close the fronts were to the city and how many mine fields exist," adds Jusufovic, who lived through the Bosnian Serbs' three-year siege of the city.

The country's most famous tourist symbol — an arched 16th-century bridge in Mostar — was destroyed by Bosnian Croats in 1993 but has since been rebuilt with international aid.

Don't wander off

The Bjelasnica ski resort, site of the women's downhill competition in the 1984 Winter Olympics, has also been rebuilt, though skiers are cautioned against wandering into the woods on account of mines.

Visoko's "pyramids" drew as many as 5,000 people a day last summer, including many foreigners, according to their purported discoverer, Semir Osmanagic, a Bosnian-born amateur historian and metal shop owner in Houston. The digs at the alleged pyramids — which Osmanagic claims are larger and older than the Great Pyramids of Egypt — have upset academics, because of fears they may damage Neolithic, Roman and medieval sites.

Others fear the country may squander valuable assets — rivers, lakes, and mountain scenery — in the rush to exploit natural resources. The Croat-Bosniak Federation government is building five new hydroelectric dams, which threaten to flood the Neretva Canyon and a 15th-century monastery.

"Bosnia-Herzegovina has extra energy, but the European Union is drooling over the chance to get power without damming its own rivers," says Clancy, whose group opposes the project. "It would be unwise to built without considering future effects on the environment."

Go there...Visocica Hill

From the UAE
Sarajevo is the closest international airport to Visoko.

From Dubai: Lufthansa flies six days a week. Fare: Dh3,800
Turkish Airlines flies four days a week. Fare: Dh2,000
Austrian Airlines flies daily. Fare: Dh1,900 (All fares exclusive of taxes)

— Information courtesy: Al Tayer Travel Agency