The Uzbekistan government is on an ambitious tourism drive – but is sparring with heritage experts over how to protect its historical sites.

The sound of a jackhammer rattles through the air. In Bukhara, a former trading hub on the ancient Silk Road in what is now Uzbekistan, tourism is the new commerce and new hotels are popping up on every street corner. I've counted three construction sites in a 100m radius outside the former caravanserai where I'm staying, and I observe the progress of a guesthouse being built just metres from a 16th-Century madrasa (school).

It's a trend that's visible across the country. In the capital, Tashkent, construction work for a shopping mall lines the avenue leading up to the Hazrati Imam mosque complex, next to the shiny, almost-completed Centre for Islamic Civilisation. The small historic city of Khiva, surrounded by mud fortifications, cannot expand outwards – but mud-and-straw residences in the historic centre are being knocked down and replaced by modern hotels. It is perhaps most obvious in Samarkand, where billionaire businessman Bakhtiyor Fazilov has poured money into flashy projects to raise his home city's profile, such as a new airline, an international airport that opened in 2022 and the strange Disneyland facsimile Silk Road Samarkand, a soulless and sanitised tourist resort situated outside the city.

"The concept of the Silk Road is being applied to everything," said Svetlana Gorshenina, a researcher and member of the Uzbek heritage protection association Alerte Héritage. "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 thing is: it's working. The World Economic Forum's Travel and Tourism Development Index now ranks Uzbekistan at 78th out of 119 countries, moving up 16 places in the last five years. The Uzbek government is ploughing investment into its tourism sector after the country's president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, laid out his Uzbekistan 2030 strategy in September 2023, an enormous governmental plan detailing the goals to be achieved in various sectors by that date. That includes increasing the number of foreign tourists to 15 million, more than double the 6.6 million visitors to the country in 2023. He has also called for the creation of "tourist clusters" – complexes providing accommodation and other services for tourists in one place.

One of these new clusters is the reason I've come to Bukhara. It's a 33-hectare site on the fringes of the old town on which a leisure complex called Eternal Bukhara will soon be built. Samarkand tycoon Fazilov has a hand in this project too: he's the chairman of one of Uzbekistan's largest contractors, Enter Engineering, which is building the complex. The company is cagey about its actual plans for the site – not least because it has already proven quite contentious.

Initial plans reported in the

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