Over the past 15 years, Da Nang’s Ngu Hanh Son District has made its ceaseless efforts to shift its economic structure more towards services, industry and agriculture in order to achieve its sustainable development goals.

Stone sculptures at the Non Nuoc stone carving village

In order to realise its target, the district authorities have focused on issuing more preferential policies for the development of maritime tourism, making the Marble Mountains Tourist Area more inviting to visitors, and creating favourable environment for tourism businesses.

In particular, the Marble Mountains Tourist Area has been embellished to satisfy the increasing demand of visitors. The annual Quan The Am (Avalokitesvara) Festival, which was recognised in 2000 as one of Viet Nam’s top 15 national-level spiritual festivals, has drawn a great deal of attention from Buddhists and non- Buddhists across from the city and elsewhere in the country.

In 1997, the Marble Mountains Tourist Area welcomed only 150,000 visitors, and the district earned about 2 billion VND in revenue.

However, this attractive tourist site hosted a total of 3.8 million visitors between 2016 and 2017, and over 2 million of them were foreigners. Thanks to this, the city's tourism sector earned 141.79 billion VND in revenue.

In the first 7 months of this year alone, the site received over 1.2 million visitors, which brought over 42.803 billion VND to the district’s budget, representing 82% of the year’s target.

Mr Nguyen Van Hien, Head of the Management Board of the tourist site, said his board was paying special attention to reaching the target of welcoming over 1.5 million domestic and foreign visitors in the remaining months of the year, and contributing  65 billion VND in revenue to the district’s budget, representing a rise of about 13 billion VND against last year.

To date, numerous large-scale and high-quality tourism projects have been put into operation.

In addition, the Non Nuoc stone carving village has made significant contributions to the district’s progress and raised the prestige of its production and business activities.

The village is now home to more than 20 businesses and nearly 500 stone carving establishments. They produce around 200 billion VND in sales revenue every year, and create jobs for over 4,500 people.

Chairwoman of the Ngu Hanh Son District People’s Committee, Ms Nguyen Thi Anh Thi, remarked a challenge facing the district is that local tourism products have yet to inspire visitors from both home and aboard to extend their stay periods here.

She, therefore, highlighted the significance of accelerating the construction progress of tourism projects in the locality, increasing checks of the quality of tourism products, and ensuring a clean, friendly and hospitable tourism environment for visitors. The aim of all these efforts is to promote the district’s socio-economic development, and build the district into a service and tourism hub in the city.