‘Are we joking?’: Venice residents protest as city starts charging visitors to enter
Angela Giuffrida
Authorities in Venice have been accused of transforming the famous lagoon city into a “theme park” as a long-mooted entrance fee for day trippers comes into force.
Venice is the first major city in the world to enact such a scheme. The €5 (£4.30) charge, which comes into force today, is aimed at protecting the Unesco world heritage site from the effects of excessive tourism by deterring day trippers and, according to the mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, making the city “livable” again.
But several residents’ committees and associations have planned protests for Thursday, arguing that the fee will do nothing to resolve the issue.
“I can tell you that almost the entire city is against it,” claimed Matteo Secchi, who leads Venessia.com, a residents’ activist group. “You can’t impose an entrance fee to a city; all they’re doing is transforming it into a theme park. This is a bad image for Venice … I mean, are we joking?”
Once the heart of a powerful maritime republic, Venice’s main island has lost more than 120,000 residents since the early 1950s, driven away by a number of issues but predominantly a focus on mass tourism that has caused the population to be dwarfed by the thousands of visitors who crowd its squares, bridges and narrow walkways at the busiest times of the year.
Key events
Here are more photos from today’s protest in Venice.
Jon Henley
Entrance fees, visitor zones and taxes: how Europe’s biggest cities are tackling overtourism
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.
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.
Ajit Niranjan
When tourists flock to a travel-guide hotspot – clogging ports with dirty cruise ships and pumping planet-heating pollutants out of planes – the environment is one of their first victims.
That’s why Barcelona’s plan to fund climate action with a tourist tax could solve two problems at once: limiting the number of visitors who strain the drought-stricken city’s water supplies and financing green policies that clean the air and keep people safe during heatwaves.
The city council said it will invest €100m in climate control systems in 170 schools – 148 of which are primary schools – over the next five years. It plans to pay for the measures, which it estimates will benefit 55,519 students, by hiking the tourist tax.
Heatwaves have grown hotter, longer and more common as carbon pollution has baked the planet. As well as the large death toll from heat – which scientists pegged at 70,000 people across Europe in 2022 – hot weather makes it harder for students to learn.
Barcelona’s plan includes sticking solar panels on rooftops to produce enough energy to power new heat pumps, which keep buildings warm in winter and air conditioners, which keep them cool in summer. The city plans to share the extra energy from the solar panels with the local communities.
Protests in Venice as city introduces fee
Here are the latest images from Venice, where some are protesting a new five-euro fee.
Amsterdam targets river cruises
Senay Boztas
The latest target in Amsterdam’s decade-long battle against overtourism is an unlikely one: river cruises.
City finance chief Hester van Buren announced this month that the city wants to halve the number of river cruises by 2028, from the current total of 2125. Councillors have already voted to close an ocean cruise terminal in the city centre.
But local businesses have suggested visitors who take river boat tours from Amsterdam are not typically nuisance tourists. The 271,000 people are often older, enjoy a night at a hotel and spend an estimated €63 million.
However, it is all part of around 100 measures to try to stem tourism, which exploded after late mayor Eberhard van der Laan brokered a deal with Airbnb to officially allow holiday home rentals in 2014 – and take a cut of the tax.
Since 2023, smoking cannabis outside has been banned in the city centre, there are restrictions on alcohol sales, pubs have earlier closing times in the red light district, and the city plans to close 100 brothel windows and move them to an “erotic centre”. City tax is up and a “stay away” plan to dissuade nuisance young Brits hit the global headlines and will be expanded to other nations such as the French, Germans and Dutch themselves.
Despite all this, hotel overnights rose to over 20 million last year (not including holiday rentals) and although there’s an official ban on new hotels, 26 are being built. The Dutch came up with the word “overtourism” in 2017 and it’s still an everyday term.
‘What fee?’ Tourists react to new Venice fee
Angela Giuffrida
Tourists arriving in Venice on Thursday were welcomed by ticket controllers as the city became the first in the world to charge an entrance fee.
The hotly debated measure, targeted at day-trippers, kicked in at 8.30am. Most of the day-trippers arriving at Santa Lucia station came pre-prepared with a QR code proving they had payed the €5 toll, but the initiative sparked confusion among people staying in hotels who, even though they are exempt, were unaware they would still have to endure the rigmarole of going online to confirm their exemption.
A steward guided Yvonne McKenna and Ken Mehan, who had just arrived on an overnight train from Vienna, through the process, which took about 10 minutes.
“I knew about the new tax and I knew about the exemption but I didn’t know we would be doing this when we arrived,” said McKenna. “It does seem to take a long time…imagine if you weren’t so up on all the technology?”
Others were totally oblivious to the new measure. “What fee?” asked Elizabeth from America, before being taught how to pay online.
The initiative has caused much division in Venice, with opponents arguing that it is against the principle of freedom of movement and will do nothing to meaningfully address over-tourism.
Some who live in other tourist hotspots sympathise with their plight, but support the fee.
Jana Plevova, from Prague, is spending five nights in the city and so is exempt as she already pays a nightly tourist tax, but said she would have no problem paying €5 to enter for the day.
“I come from Prague which is also suffering from over-tourism so paying €5 is not that much for trying to preserve this beauty,” she said.
Only about one in ten people present in Venice have paid a €5 fee to access the city, Ansa reported today.
Angelique Chrisafis
The daily Le Parisien ran a front page on the Venice scheme drawing comparisons with the challenges of over-tourism at some sites in France.
For example, the Calanques de Sugiton, in the Calanques national park near Marseille, has put in place a quota reservation system for hikers and swimmers at peak moments in the summer months to protect the ecosystem from erosion and overcrowding.
The paper cited an OpinionWay poll for Evaneos in which 60% of French people said they had suffered because of overtourism. Three quarters said they had given up on visiting a site because of overcrowding.
Éric Straumann, the mayor of the picturesque Alsace town of Colmar told the paper he was thinking about whether to introduce some kind of limited access to the Christmas market, which at weekends can reach 150,000 visitors in a town of 70,000 people.
There are islands in France which limit the number of daily visitors in the summer, for example the Île-de-Brehat in Brittany and at Porquerolles in the south. The Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy does not have quotas, but shuttle buses to the site have been limited and car-park reservations introduced.
Ashifa Kassam
‘A family used to live here’: The Spanish sticker rebellion battling tourist lets
Incensed after finding out his rental home of 10 years was about to become a tourist apartment, Dani Romero took to social media.
What followed swiftly snowballed into a movement, as residents in Málaga began plastering stickers – reading “A family used to live here” or “Go home” – outside tourist lets across the southern Spanish city.
“I didn’t mean to arm a revolution,” said Romero. “I’m just looking for a house to live in.”
At the core of what one Spanish broadcaster called “the sticker rebellion” is not a rejection of tourism, said Romero. Instead, as city residents grapple with a record number of tourists, it’s a cri de coeur for a more balanced approach that could allow for a better coexistence between residents and tourists.
It’s a debate playing out across Europe, as cities from Athens to Amsterdam wrestle with how best to tackle overtourism.
Read the full story here.
NGO cautions about environmental impact of over-tourism
Transport & Environment, an NGO campaigning for cleaner transport, has warned about the impact of over-tourism.
”The current number of cruise ships globally is higher than it’s ever been, according to data from Clarksons Research,” the NGO said this morning.
“In 2022, Europe’s 218 cruise ships emitted as much sulphur oxides (SOx) as 1 billion cars, T&E’s Return of the Cruise report (2023) found,” it said, noting that “Europe’s cruise ships emit 8 million tonnes of CO2 every year.”
“In 2021 Venice banned large cruise ships from entering the city. This led to an 80% fall in SOX emissions from cruise ships. Barcelona is now Europe’s most polluted port,” Transport & Environment said.
Carlos Calvo Ambel, senior director for Non-Road Transport at T&E, added:
Europe’s luxury cruise ships emit as much toxic sulphur as a billion cars, and low-cost airlines are now polluting more CO2 than ever.
The uncontrolled growth of these two sectors must come to an end.
Cruise ships should plug into electricity if they want to dock, and the adoption of zero-emission fuels by cruises and airlines needs to happen fast. If cruise lines and airlines don’t radically change how they operate, they will increasingly be seen as unwanted guests.
Venice access fee: what is it and how much does it cost?
Angela Giuffrida
Why is this being introduced?
According to Simone Venturini, the city’s councillor for tourism, Venice “affixed itself” to mass tourism in the 1960s and since then visitor numbers have surged to the point that during the busiest periods of the year it attracts an average of 40,000 people a day.
That number has put pressure on the fragile lagoon, while pushing residents away from the main island. Brugnaro said he wanted to make Venice “livable” again.
However, the final push to enact the measure came after Unesco threatened last year to put Venice on its list of heritage sites in danger, citing mass tourism and rising water levels attributed to climate change.
How much is the charge and who has to pay?
The “Venice access fee” costs €5 (£4.30).
Preparations were underway in Venice for the introduction of a new access fee.
‘Are we joking?’: Venice residents protest as city starts charging visitors to enter
Angela Giuffrida
Authorities in Venice have been accused of transforming the famous lagoon city into a “theme park” as a long-mooted entrance fee for day trippers comes into force.
Venice is the first major city in the world to enact such a scheme. The €5 (£4.30) charge, which comes into force today, is aimed at protecting the Unesco world heritage site from the effects of excessive tourism by deterring day trippers and, according to the mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, making the city “livable” again.
But several residents’ committees and associations have planned protests for Thursday, arguing that the fee will do nothing to resolve the issue.
“I can tell you that almost the entire city is against it,” claimed Matteo Secchi, who leads Venessia.com, a residents’ activist group. “You can’t impose an entrance fee to a city; all they’re doing is transforming it into a theme park. This is a bad image for Venice … I mean, are we joking?”
Once the heart of a powerful maritime republic, Venice’s main island has lost more than 120,000 residents since the early 1950s, driven away by a number of issues but predominantly a focus on mass tourism that has caused the population to be dwarfed by the thousands of visitors who crowd its squares, bridges and narrow walkways at the busiest times of the year.
Welcome to the blog
Good morning and welcome to the blog. Today we will be delving into the issue of overtourism.
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