Uludağ National Park

Overview

Guide

Uludağ National Park covers 13,024 hectares south and south-east of the city of Bursa, and was declared a national park and taken under protection in 1961. It can be reached by road and by cable car, and a great many paths on the northern and southern slopes of the mountain make it possible to move between the valleys and hills within the park.

From 1963 to 1972 the park was administered as a forest district chieftaincy from Kirazlıyayla, at 1,500 metres. The forest engineer Orhan Camcı, its founding district chief, directed the development of the infrastructure until 1972. The projects completed in that period included the development of the administrative centre at Kirazlıyayla, the opening of the Sarıalan road, the development of the first hotels zone, the laying out of the Karabelen park entrance, the building of many fountains, the construction of the Sarıalan campsite and the laying out of the Çobankaya camping grounds. Among his most important contributions within the park was the administrative building put up in the hotels zone at 1,900 metres, which served at the time as the park headquarters and as a natural history museum. Bringing electricity to the tungsten mine then worked by Etibank, opening the mine road to park standards, laying out and developing the ski areas, developing the deer breeding ground at Yeşiltarla, and producing waymarks and signs in the camping grounds to a set park standard are also among the works of note. In 1972 the district chieftaincy was made a national park forest management directorate.

The protection status of the park varies within it, and the size of the area has been changed from time to time; a cabinet decision of 13 March 2006, for instance, took a total of 1,600 hectares outside the national park. Under the conservation site status defined in 2006, about eighty-six per cent of the area — 11,219 hectares — was defined as a first-degree natural conservation site and fourteen per cent — 1,804 hectares — as second-degree.

A change of regulation in 2009 divided the area into three zones: absolute protection, limited use and controlled use. The absolute protection zone covers 10,850 hectares, eighty-four per cent of the area; 1,925 hectares are limited-use and 248 hectares controlled-use. Building is permitted according to the degree of use, and the facilities within the national park lie in the sixteen per cent outside the absolute protection zone.