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fees, visitor zones and taxes: how Europe’s biggest cities are tackling
overtourism
From Seville
to Venice to Amsterdam, Europe is learning to improve locals’ lives by curbing
tourists’ enthusiasm
Jon Henley
Sun 3 Mar 2024 09.08 GMT
Originally built for the grand Ibero-American Exposition of
1929, Seville’s flamboyant neo-Moorish Plaza de España has for nearly a
century been one of the city’s major attractions, an ornate showcase for
Spanish architecture and decorative tiling.
But the several thousand visitors from around the world who
throng the plaza every day, on foot or in horse-drawn carriages, may soon have
to pay for the privilege, with proceeds from a planned entry fee going towards
its upkeep.
“We are planning to close the Plaza de España and charge
tourists to finance its conservation and ensure its safety,” Seville’s mayor,
José Luis Sanz, announced on X last week, posting a video showing missing tiles
and damaged facades.
Sanz made clear local residents and visitors from Andalucía
province would not have to cough up to visit the plaza, which served as a
backdrop in a Star Wars film, and is used regularly for concerts, fashion shows
and theatrical performances.
Many residents objected to the scheme nonetheless – but
their criticism was mostly that it would be complicated to administer and not
very effective. Far better, many locals said, would be a hefty tourism tax on
all visitors to Seville.
“Mass tourism,” said one, “is destroying our city.”
It’s a refrain heard in historic cities across Europe, from
Prague to Barcelona, Athens to Amsterdam. Mass tourism, promoted by cash-hungry
councils since the 2008 crash and fuelled by cheap flights and online room
rentals, has become a monster.
After plummeting during Covid, tourism numbers are soaring
again and set to exceed pre-pandemic levels this summer. The number of
low-cost airline seats in Europe, which rose 10% annually from 2010 and hit
500m in 2019, could pass 800m in 2024.
Before lockdown, Airbnb, the biggest but far from only
platform for short lets, saw triple-digit growth in some European cities. The
net result is that the most popular city break destinations now annually host
20 or more visitors for each local.
What to do about it, though, is no easy question. Delicate
balances need to be struck between the much-needed revenues and jobs generated
by tourism, and the quality of life of residents; between managing tourism and
discouraging it.
One strategy that Seville – 3 million tourists a year for
700,000 inhabitants – may adopt is to charge for the big attractions. Since
January, foreign visitors to Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, which gets about 3.5m
visits a year, have been paying €25 for the privilege.
Venice is so overrun by visitors it has introduced what
amounts to an entrance fee for the entire city, ranging from €3 to €10. Paris
has almost trebled its tourist tax rates, from – depending on area and
accommodation type – €0.25-€5 to €0.65-€14.95.
Other cities are relying on better management – Athens, for
example, last summer introduced a time-slot system for visits to the Acropolis,
while summer access to Marseille’s Calanques is now regulated through a free
reservation scheme.
Some places are launching information campaigns aiming to
reshape tourist flows. France, where 80% of visits are concentrated in 20% of
the country, will this spring roll out a €1m campaign urging domestic and
foreign tourists to head more off the beaten track.
From Mont Saint-Michel and the seaside resort of Étretat in
Normandy to the Atlantic beaches of the south-west and the Riviera,
peak-season influxes now threaten the environment, locals’ quality of life and
the visitor experience, authorities say.
They are also setting up a tourism observatory to accurately
measure flows and identify possible overloads. “France is the world’s biggest
tourist destination, but we have a serious lack of data to help manage the
crowds,” the government said.
Some anti-tourism measures, however, turn out to be just
rumours. Last summer, the walled Croatian town of Dubrovnik, said to be the
most over-visited destination in Europe, with 36 visitors per resident, was
widely reported to have banned wheelie suitcases.
In fact, as part of a Respect the City campaign urging
visitors to dress appropriately in the historic centre and avoid climbing on
monuments, the town hall had just asked them to carry their bags over
cobblestones to reduce the noise level for locals.
The
Netherlands
In the capital of the country that coined the term
overtoerisme, tourist might be a dirty word – but Amsterdam is also
increasingly desperate for visitors’ cash.
A plan last March to dissuade partying young British men
with “stay away” videos warning of fines, hospital and criminal records made
headlines worldwide. It’s unclear what effect it had, though, as Amsterdam’s
overnight tourist numbers last year hit almost pre-pandemic levels at 9 million
– 21% more than in 2022.
A soft-soap Renew your View campaign highlighting positive
aspects off the beaten track (rather than sex and drugs) launched in November.
Meanwhile the city is expected to expand its stay-away campaign to dissuade
nuisance tourists from Germany, France, Spain and Italy after the summer.
Since last spring there has been a ban on smoking cannabis
in public space in the red light district, while bar closures at 2am instead
of 4am have reduced street numbers by between 30% and 60%. However, after
complaints about safety, sex-worker brothel windows are open until 6am again
rather than 3am.
Amsterdam is reducing the number of licensed B&B
premises by 30%, has voted to close a city centre cruise terminal and is
trialling tougher licensing measures to remove “rogue” tourist businesses such
as candy shops suspected of being criminal fronts.
The council says it is monitoring tourist numbers to try to
maintain a balance. But multimillion budget shortfalls and a bill of billions
to repair crumbling canalsides mean tourism is essential for Amsterdam: this
year, the tourist tax rose from 7% to 12.5%, the highest in Europe, with a day
tax of €14 a head for visiting cruise ships. Senay Boztas
Spain
Spain received 85 million tourists in 2023, nearly 2% up on
pre-pandemic 2019 – and in a country where tourism generates 13% of GDP,
after the economic devastation of the Covid years, voices calling for curbs
on numbers have been virtually silenced.
The hospitality business, however, continues to chant the
mantra of quality over quantity – nowhere more so than in the Balearic Islands,
where a new law is being drafted to crack down on drunk tourists.
Last year about 15 million people visited the Balearics
(population 2 million), more than half British and German, with a significant
percentage coming for what the regional government calls “tourism of excess”: a
week-long drinking binge.
The new law to crack down on booze tourism is expected to be
in force when the season kicks off at Easter. Under a 2020 law, areas such as
Magaluf in Mallorca and Sant Antoni in Ibiza were named as trouble spots.
Heavy fines were imposed for “balconing” (leaping into a
pool from a balcony), shops were banned from selling alcohol after 9.30pm, and
organised pub crawls, beach parties, party boats and two-for-one happy hours
outlawed, Local businesses faced fines of up to €600,000.
But after areas such as Magaluf complained of being
stigmatised, the new law will focus more on individuals. Among the planned
measures are deportation for antisocial behaviour and a blacklist of people
banned from visiting the islands.
Lawyers warn that this would infringe the EU’s principle of
freedom of movement, although as the UK is no longer a member, rowdy Brits –
who are among the worst offenders – could soon find themselves personae non
gratae. Stephen Burgen
Italy
After years of talk, Venice is the first major tourist
hotspot in Italy to introduce an entrance fee for day trippers. The measure
kicks off at the start of peak season on 25 April, and in a first experimental
phase will apply only on certain days until 14 July.
The €5 tickets have been bookable online since mid-January.
Time will tell whether the controversial initiative works, but with visitor
numbers back to pre-pandemic levels – an average of 40,000 day trippers on peak
days – and the perennial threat of the fragile lagoon city losing its Unesco
heritage status, authorities were forced to act. The city is also poised to
limit tourist groups to 25 people from June and to ban the use of loudspeakers
because they “generate confusion and disturbances”, Venice council said in late
December.
Florence has long suffered from similar overtourism woes and
an exodus of residents from its historic centre, prompting the council in
October last year to ban new short-term lets in the historic centre from Airbnb
and similar platforms.
The city’s mayor, Dario Nardella, said that while the
initiative was not a “panacea”, it was a “concrete step” for tackling the issue
in a city with a population of about 720,000 that records, on average, more
than 16 miilion overnight visitor stays a year.
Elsewhere in Italy, drivers along the Amalfi coast will
again be hit by a measure aimed at preventing a perpetual jam along the
winding 35km coastal road described as “a nightmare” by locals. Cars with
number plates ending in an odd number are allowed to use the road one day, and
those ending in an even number the next.
In Cinque Terre, another Unesco site, local authorities are
also pondering how to manage overtourism. “We don’t want fewer tourists, but we
want to be able to manage [tourism] in a sustainable way,” Donatella Bianchi,
president of Cinque Terre national park, said last month. Angela Giuffrida
Greece
In Greece, one of the most visited places in the world,
soaring tourist numbers are not only straining infrastructure on island
idylls but increasingly stretching capacity in Athens, where residents, as
elsewhere, are up in arms.
Once a stopover for travellers en route to isles, the Greek
metropolis is now a “must-see” destination in its own right, drawing more than
7 million tourists – an all-time record – in 2023, with Americans and Britons
topping arrivals.
To cope with an influx that is only expected to grow when
the Asian market rebounds, Greek authorities have announced that crowd control
policies – implemented in pilot form at the Acropolis in September – will be
expanded to other archaeological sites next month.
Last year, at the height of the season, more than 20,000
tourists a day climbed the hill to see the fifth-century BC site. “We got to
the point of as many as 23,000 a day,” the Greek culture minister, Lina
Mendoni, said. “Tourism is obviously desirable for the country, for all of us,
but we have to ensure overtourism doesn’t harm the monument.”
The visitor zone scheme, in operation from 8am to 8pm, aims
to ease congestion, with authorities introducing a time-slot system,
electronic ticketing and fast-lane entry points for organised groups. “It will
help ensure the safety of the monument and those who work there, and improve
the experience of visitors,” Mendoni said.
Museums will also cap visitor numbers from April.
The spectre of the country enjoying another bumper year of
tourism has been met with mounting fears among environmentalists on islands
where communities have increasingly struggled with waste management, water
scarcity, insufficient public services and illegal construction.
In the face of local disgruntlement the government has been
forced to step in. On Santorini, where complaints of oversaturation have grown
steadily over the years, a berth-allocation system for cruise ships was
introduced, with the number of disembarkations in any 24-hour period being
limited to 8,000 passengers.
On Mykonos – like Santorini, one of the most popular islands
in the Cycladic chain – authorities have clamped down on illicit construction,
bulldozing illegally built bars and eateries in prime sites. Helena Smith
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