YEREVAN. – A total of 16,500 foreign tourists visited the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR/Artsakh) in 2015, NKR Deputy Minister of Economy Sergey Shahverdyan on Monday told reporters in Armenia’s capital city of Yerevan.

In his words, the number of these visits was increasing by 30 to 40 percent per year, for several years. Even though this growth rate slowed down all the way to 13 percent in 2014, this indicator increased again in the year past.

“And if we speak about the tourists arriving from the Republic of Armenia and the [Armenian] diaspora, this number is much larger,” Shahverdyan added.

As per the Artsakh official, tourists from foreign countries visit the NKR primarily from Russia, and most of these visitors are of Armenian origin. Second and third are US and the European countries, respectively.