In Mallorca again this week thousands were on the streets protesting against mass tourism. Some 14 million foreign visitors holidayed in the Balearics last year and the protests focused on “plummeting living standards”, and the price and scarcity of housing for its people. In Malaga and the Canary Islands they have been marching too. In Barcelona, tourists have been drenched with water pistols. Its population of 1.7 million last year “welcomed” more than 12 million tourists for at least one night.
Elsewhere, responding to a mix of fears of environmental damage and economic pressure on their own population, tourism hotspots are pondering measures to curb numbers.
Venice, its population down to 50,000 from more than 120,000 since the early 1950s, has banned cruise ships from the lagoon and in April supplemented bed taxes with an ineffectual €5 daily charge on day-trippers – less than the price of a cup of coffee in Piazza San Marco. Since April the charge has been levied 485,000 times, but to little apparent effect.
Encouraged by Unesco, which last year listed 55 endangered sites under threat from mass tourism, from the Old City of Jerusalem to Timbuktu, others are trying to manage sustainable tourism with zero-growth strategies.
Bassekou Kouyate: ‘I am on a mission to promote my instrument, the ngoni, which predates Jesus Christ’
An Irishwoman in New York: I’m flattered, but why do Americans love the Irish so much?
Brat summer: Annoying, dirty, hedonistic, bra-less, is this the end of the clean girl era?
Deadpool & Wolverine review: One star for this awful, awful pile of puerile, snarky parody
The Galápagos , where visitors hit a record high in 2023, pushing waste management systems to the limit and increasing the threat of devastating invasive species, has raised entry fees from €100 to €200 a head. Other wildlife destinations such as the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania and the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya already charge substantially more for entry.
Bali is introducing a visitor levy, while officials in Japan, also reeling from a glut of visitors who now contribute 9 per cent to its GDP, are also contemplating measures to reduce the crowds who swarm Kyoto or queue for hours simply to photograph Mount Fiji.
Cheap travel and rising living standards are fuelling insatiable demand and creating environmental pressures, but is there a way to call a halt?