Biggest danger to
When it comes to wreaking destruction on some of the most beautiful places on the planet, what’s right up there at the top of the offenders’ list? Tourists. That’s right, you and me. Why? Because no matter how precious a place, or a monument or a landscape, money talks.
Bye Bye Barcelona is a documentary doing the rounds on YouTube. Shot by artist Eduardo Chibas it gives natives of the city a voice, and the opportunity to express their displeasure at how their city is being destroyed by the negative impact of tourism. The Catalan city, say some, is becoming a theme park. It’s time to shout Stop! But what can be done as, in many places, commerce causes more destruction than war ever did?
In Venice, a city close to my heart, only 60,000 people are privileged enough to call the city home but every year some 20 million outsiders tramp all over it.
Not least of those are the thousands upon thousands who arrive on 100,000-ton cruise ships – those floating horror palaces that stand 14 or 15 storeys high – in the waters of the relatively narrow Giudecca Canal which pours into the basin close to St Mark’s Square.
An attempt to ban such liners from the city was, unbelievably, recently overturned by the Italian courts following intense lobbying from the shipping operators.
It’s easy, of course, when you love a place so much that you feel like a local when you visit, to forget that you are a tourist, too. But there are things you can do.
When I visit Venice these days I travel out of season, I avoid the main sights and eschew the glass and leather shops where the goods owe more to Macau than to Murano. And I eat where the locals eat – in proper little restaurants that have sustained the same family for generations. (Like Altanella, where the elderly owner turned Elton John away a couple of summers ago because he was booked out with his regulars for Sunday lunch.)
Special places require special protection and I would happily, for example, pay a substantial Venice tax every time I visit. I would also limit visitor numbers to the major sights and lay on ‘tourist-only’ vaporettos (the water buses) so that locals are not inconvenienced.
In Barcelona, meanwhile, the ‘privatisation’ of Gaudi’s stunning Parc Güell and the imposition of a €7 entrance fee has caused a stir. The last time I visited, I wandered there on a Sunday morning and watched a group of elderly locals set-dancing beneath the trees. Under new regulations they would still have free access to the park but, as a tourist, I would have to pay to enter. If that helps preserve one of Spain’s most memorable sights, what’s wrong with that?