Panic in beautiful country turning into 'Venice in the desert'

A beautiful country is becoming "Venice in the desert" due to overtourism. The Uzbekistan government has been seeking more tourists, with new tourist spaces being built across the country, but is now grappling with the effect on historic sites.

The mud-and-straw houses in the centre of the historic cityof Khiva are being knocked down to make way for swanky new accommodation. In 2022, billionaire Bakhtiyor Fazilov opened a new airport and a tourist resort called Silk Road in Samarkand in an attempt to raise the city's profile. An 82-acre site on the outskirts of Bukhara is being transformed into a leisure complex with hotels, restaurants, pools, malls, and a museum. The site is also hoping to attract healthcare tourists, looking for cheap dental and plastic surgery. These kinds of improvements appear to be working. Uzbekistan has moved up 16 places in the World Economic Forum's Travel and Tourism Development Index, now ranking 78th out of 119 countries. The government's investments in the tourism sector are being undertaken to increase the number of foreign tourists to 15 million, more than double the 6.6 million visitors to the country in 2023.

But not all are on board. An architect based in Bukhara told the BBC: "Every year, there are more and more tourists. I have always thought of Bukhara as a living organism, and that organism is becoming very weak and fragile. It should not become a town solely for tourists but for its residents as well. It risks becoming a Venice in the desert."

Svetlana Gorshenina, a researcher and member of the Uzbek heritage protection association Alerte Héritage, said the concept of the Silk Road is being applied to everything. Bukhara used to be a major hub on the ancient trade route.

She added: "You have Silk Road restaurants, Silk Road shops, Silk Road tours, tourist agencies uniquely dedicated to the Silk Road. It has become our only selling point and it's self-exoticising. It's a kind of self-orientalisation, which is a hangover from colonialism."

The Uzbek architect said that the government is repeating mistakes from the Soviet era: "The Soviet Union destroyed a lot of heritage and replaced it with Soviet buildings because it wanted to leave its own imprint. That tradition of demolition is still - unfortunately - in our blood."

Although the Bukhara project is not within the UNESCO World Heritage Site historic centre, it falls within the "buffer zone", where changes require validation.

A spokesperson for UNESCO said that they were "closely monitoring" the situation, adding: "We hope that the authorities will comply with their commitments to the World Heritage Convention and that they will not carry out any demolition/construction project without the prior assessment of the World Heritage Committee in July 2025."