Imagine that you are sitting in your kitchen, on an ordinary chair, and you feel a sudden thump as if someone had just kicked your chair. That would be equivalent to an earthquake (or “seismic tremor”) of 1.0 on the Richter scale which measures these things. Imagine, then, if your house shook, as if someone had just driven a jeep into your front wall. That would be equivalent to a tremor of between 4.0 and 5.0 on the Richter scale.
This is what the people of Santorini began to experience in late January. In total there have been more than 21,000 such tremors in the sea area between Santorini and neighbouring islands Amorgos and Ios, ranging from 1.0 to 5.6 on the Richter scale. The tremors seemed to stop on February 26th, but the continuous shocks were the equivalent of the kitchen-type thump every two minutes, night and day, for a whole month.
Little wonder, then, that 9,000 of the island’s 15,000 permanent residents were evacuated and are only just beginning to return. It was not only their houses which were at stake, but their livelihoods since Santorini is one of Greece’s most popular islands for tourism.
Santorini is in fact the edge of a crater caused by a now-extinct volcano. The volcanic soil, which is home to the indigenous Assyrtiko grape which makes one of Greece’s most highly-prized wines, is crumbly, raising fears that tremors like those of last month could lead to soil erosion and the collapse of many tourist facilities built too close to the edge.
Hebrew graffiti and a mass funeral in a Lebanese village on the Israeli border
Israeli security services point finger at Netanyahu as they own up to errors over Hamas’s October 7th incursion
Turkey’s Erdogan makes risky bet on peace with Kurds
‘We’ll rest when we win’: No let-up for Ukraine’s medics and rescue teams as war with Russia grinds on
Santorini has long been a focus for the problems of over-tourism. The tremors, and the danger they present for the future of sustainable tourism, have put down a marker for the development of tourism generally in Greece.
Seismic activity is common throughout Greece. In 1956 Santorini itself was hit by a tremor of 7.5 Richter, killing 53 people and damaging or destroying 80 per cent of its buildings. In 1953 the Ionian island of Cephalonia was largely devastated by a similar earthquake. This type of activity has prompted the ENA Institute, an Athens-based think-tank, to propose a model which would continue to deliver the tourism product without diminishing quality of life for its people.
It comes at a time when the need for a national policy on tourism, and the necessary agencies for implementing and safeguarding it, is paramount.
Tourism legislation agreed by parliament in January this year was aimed mainly at regulating short-term rentals (Airbnb) but carried the now obligatory aim “to promote sustainable tourism operations by embedding principles of environmental responsibility”.
This is widely regarded as hot air (of which Greece has plenty in any case) since in the Cyclades region especially areas designated as protected by “Natura 2000” are under threat from five-star luxury resorts which are, inexplicably, being built inside those areas and reducing the natural habitat to one geared principally towards the holiday-maker.
The Cyclades region (the islands lying in a circular pattern around the sacred isle of Delos) are particularly prone to over-development. The largest is Naxos, but the group includes Santorini, Mykonos, with its ongoing problem of over-building, and Milos (home of the world famous Venus de Milo sculpture, which is displayed in Paris’s Louvre museum). Milos has 43 hotels with 1,781 beds. Some 48 new projects are coming on stream which will increase the beds by 2,700 to a total of more than 4,500, which residents fear will swamp their own lives.
Many of these new hotels are the 99-bed variety, thus avoiding the current threshold of 100-bed capacity which requires its management to be environmentally responsible. The mayor of Milos recently said: “Soon our island will be covered in concrete, and we won’t be able to handle basic services like water, waste or traffic. We’ll be left with nothing but cement.”
Meanwhile, on Corfu (where I live) the scandal of the unique headland of Erimitis has come into focus again. In 2020 Greece’s prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis came here and called the headland “a waste of space” because it did not produce a financial profit. The original developers having withdrawn, largely due to local and international protests, Mitsotakis has performed a U-turn, and now speaks of a reduced development by the new owners with “absolute respect for the environment”.
Local groups are asking how one can have “absolute” respect when the recreational resource which is a pristine combination of forest, wetland and marine shorelife, would be completely changed in character with a hotel, villas and a marina. “The greatest respect” is well known as a term of contempt.
And if, by the way, you did want to spend big money on a villa in Corfu you have missed the cruise ship: the Magna Graecia villa in the island’s northeast, extending to 2,200sq m and 11 bedrooms, has just been sold by Sotheby’s International for a mere €21.5 million. Sleep well.
