Selfie-taking Frozen fans overrun village
Austrian hamlet that inspired Disney film to cut number of tourists after up to 10,000 arrive each day
WITH its frozen vistas and sparkling lakes, the Austrian hamlet of Hallstatt is renowned as a real-world inspiration for Frozen, Disney’s hit musical.
But fame has brought unbearable levels of tourism to the 16th-century settlement, which is inundated with selfie-taking tourists who seem more interested in their Instagram profiles than local businesses and culture.
Now Hallstatt’s tourism chiefs are planning a campaign that they hope will put quality of tourism over quantity by limiting the number of visitors and requiring them to support the local economy.
The campaign, which is due to launch in May, will cap the number of tourist buses to 50 per day, with groups who spend their money on local restaurants and cafés given priority. Visitors
will also be asked to stay for more than two hours, and to explore the hamlet’s real treasures – which have little to do with Disney princesses – such as its 7,000-year-old salt mine.
“Many visitors only have a short time and only come to take some pictures,” Michelle Knoll, the office manager for Hallstatt’s tourism board, told The New York Times. “The number of tourists is simply too much.”
Some rogue tourists have wreaked havoc in Hallstatt, which has a population of just 780 people, since it became associated with Frozen. Churches have reportedly hired bouncers to shoo away tourists who were disrupting services by taking selfies. In some cases, visitors were caught taking photographs of mourners at funerals.
The quantity of tourists has spiralled out of control, with up to 10,000 people descending on the hamlet each day according to some estimates.
Hallstatt’s new tourism campaign was drawn up after Alexander Scheutz, its mayor, urged tourists to stay away from the hamlet as their sheer numbers were destroying the fabric of daily life. “Hallstatt is an important piece of cultural history, not a museum,” he said earlier this month. “We want to reduce numbers by at least a third but we have no way of actually stopping them.”
In October, Rachel Hosie, a travel journalist, bemoaned how the hamlet had been “completely ruined by selfietaking tourists” in an article for Insider.
“Everywhere I looked, people were taking selfies, and no one seemed to be appreciating the scenery at all,” she wrote. “It felt like the whole village was a tourist attraction, and made me feel sad about how social media has changed the way we travel.”