KOMARNA : Croatia celebrated Tuesday the opening of a long-awaited bridge linking its southern Adriatic coast including Dubrovnik with the rest of the country, bypassing a narrow strip of Bosnian territory, reports BSS.
The 2.4-kilometre (1.5-mile) span reaches out from the Croatian mainland to the Peljesac peninsula that connects with the southern part of Croatia’s coastline nestled between the sea and the Dinaric Alps.
Festivities started early Tuesday with musical performances and a boat race, while dozens of pedestrians snapped pictures on the bridge ahead of a ceremony this evening featuring a speech by Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic and a video address by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang.
“It is a major thing for people here since they did not even feel like they were living like in their own country,” said Joso Miletic, 75, who travelled from his village near the city of Zadar on the central coast to watch the opening of the bridge.
“This is the merging of Croatia into a whole,” he added. The link will bring an end to the untold hours spent by commuters, merchants, and tourists at the Bosnian border and is one of the country’s most ambitious infrastructure projects since Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991.
It was the bloody dissolution of the federation, however, that left a patchwork of divisions across the Balkans, with the frontiers between its six former republics transformed into international borders.
osnia maintained its coastal access in the end, but its small outlet leading to the Adriatic Sea cut right through Croatia.
As a result, around 90,000 people, including residents in the country’s tourism hotspot of Dubrovnik, remained cut off from the rest of the country until now.
The hard border brought lines and red tape for traders, and headaches for tourists hoping to get south by road.
“It is indeed a historic project for Croatia,” said Sabina Mikulic, owner of a hotel, glamping site, and winery in Orebic-the peninsula’s largest town.
Inhabitants of the picturesque region of red vines, pebble beaches and oyster farms are looking forward to the end of their geographic isolation caused by the Bosnian border. The hours-long waits at the border and fears over missing the day’s last ferry will now become a thing of the past, they say.
“It was really exhausting and made people living here bitter,” Mikulic .