$500m Tourist Resort Planned in Chabahar

A tourist resort in the port city of Chabahar, Sistan-Baluchestan Province, has been planned to help develop the city's tourism industry, the province's chief tourism official said.

In a report on the website of the provincial office of Iran's Cultural Heritage, Handicraft and Tourism Organization, Kambiz Moshtaq Gohari, the head of the office, said Iranian investors based abroad have shown interest in financing tourism projects in Sistan-Baluchestan Province.

"An Iranian businessman in the UAE will build a resort in Tis (a new town that is administratively part of Chabahar County)," he said, adding that the investor, who was not named, has earmarked $500 million for the scheme.

The project is in line with the government's plan to establish holiday resorts along Makran coastal strip in southwestern Iran, which has been earmarked in the sixth five-year development plan (2017-22) to boost tourism in the area due to its access to international waters via Sea of Oman. Gohari said ecotourism is of particular interest to investors, both domestic and international.

"We didn't have a single ecolodge in the entire province last year, but have received 58 requests so far this year (started March 21) to establish such properties," he said, adding that the province will have around 200 ecolodges by the end of the current Iranian year (March 20, 2018). Iran intends to turn Makran into a commercial and tourism hub in the region, but underdeveloped infrastructure has been singled out as the main shortcoming.

Makran is a semi-desert coastal strip stretching along southeastern Iran to Pakistan’s Balochistan and borders the coasts of Persian Gulf and Sea of Oman.