Tourism in Serbia
[6] Eco-friendly and sustainable tourism has also become very popular among domestic tourists, with many visiting various nature reserves and parks in the western and southern part of the country.
[7] Serbia is also known for gastronomic tourism, with Belgrade being the central meeting point with over 2000 restaurants, coffee shops, bars and nightlife venues.
[10][11] In the area of Belgrade's modern neighborhoods Ada Huja and Karaburma, which were outside of the city in the Roman period, numerous thermal springs were used for public bathhouses.
With numerous merchants and caravans traversing the country, hospitality services began to develop along the roads.
They included large inns and caravan stations with spacious inner yards for keeping animals and storing goods.
The innkeepers and [Word missing] were bound to pay for any damage or shortage during a caravan's stay in their facilities.
The upper classes built numerous summer houses, especially on the Ekmekluk Hill, today known as Zvezdara.
[15] By the 2020s, the second most visited tourist attraction in Belgrade, providing one third of foreign currency income for the city, was the bohemian quarter Skadarlija, a vintage street dotted with kafanas.
[16][17] The very first kafana in Belgrade, an oriental-style bistro, was opened in 1522 and was arguably the oldest venue of that type in Europe.
[18][19][20] Despite frequent Ottoman–Habsburg wars in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the change of occupying rulers in Belgrade and northern Serbia, the number of kafanas was always high.
[21] As Serbia remained on the main trading route connecting Middle East and western Europe, the hospitality venues along the roads continued to develop.
[9][22][23] Hospitality services in towns later diversified into numerous types: bistro, mehana, gostionica, han, saraj, lokal, krčma, bircuz, birtija, and later restoran and hotel, but until the mid-19th century they remained oriental-type venues.
[24][26] Construction of various modern hotels began in Belgrade, including "Evropa" (1867), "Nacional" (1868), "Srpska Kruna" (1869), "Pariz" (1870), "London" (1873), "Slavija" (1883), "Moskva" (1908) and "Bristol" (1912).
Villas of the royal family and wealthy industrialists and merchants boosted the construction of mansions and hotels.
In 1937, Vrnjačka Banja had five times more visitors than Dubrovnik, on the Adriatic coast (in modern Croatia), arguably the most popular resort in former Yugoslavia.
[36] In 1922, there were over 2 million overnight stays in the spas of the Morava Banovina alone, which covered a minority of the present Serbia territory.
State airline flag carrier Aeroput was founded in 1927, the same year when Belgrade's international Bežanija airport became operational.
The events surrounding the break-up of Yugoslavia led to a substantial decline in both leisure and business tourism.
Stripped of the bourgeois elitism, the spas became centers of healthcare tourism and sites of family vacations, with numerous workers' and trade unions' retreats being built.
The number of overall tourist arrivals in 2020 was the smallest in the past two decades, but it is expected to recover and stabilise within the near future.
