Tourism 2025: Seize the day and end unregulated mass tourism that is turning Europe into an over-crowded culture wasteland

Posted: 26 January, 2025 | Category: Uncategorized

Selfie taking tourists abound throughout the Mediterranean world as this selfie-obsessed visitor to Valetta Harbour in Malta would confirm (Picture: Trevor Grundy)

 

Camera clicking, self-obsessed podcasters, crime fuelling brats, booze-swilling louts, drug-taking space-heads, sick-making sun/sex-seekers. Those are just a few of the words (privately) used by local people when talking about tourists. Despite their high-spending power fuelling one of the world’s fastest growing industries, tourists will this year become some of the most hated people on earth, writes TREVOR GRUNDY

 

The Roman poet Horace (65bc-8bc) wrote Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. (Those who hurry across the sea change the sky, not their souls or state of mind).

It’s a most important saying and one that should be stamped on passports before tourists fly or sail away – leaving home slim and pale, returning home fat and orange.

Today, the impact of un-regulated mass tourism is turning parts of mankind’s most precious cultural places into cultural wastelands.

They create deserts and call them Airbnbs.

Feel the heat.

Mass hatred against tourists is in the boiler-room.

Fears that the famous Rialto Bridge in Venice will one day collapse under the weight of millions of tourists are whispered as sick jokes  in local hotels and restaurants (Picture: Trevor Grundy)

 

Dario Nardella summed things up when he recalled walking along the Via dei Calzaiuoli in Florence one Sunday morning eleven years ago.

The mayor of that wondrous cultural city between May 2014-June 2024 wrote: ”I could barely make my way through the suffocating human wall made only of tourists; there wasn’t one single Florentine face among them I could recognise.”

It was that memory that convinced the now 49-year-old that he should use his mayoral mandate to help save the Renaissance city, a civilian art gallery that was so-loved by Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, from the ravages of over-tourism that is destroying so many parts of culture-rich Europe.

He said: “I did not want Ponte Vecchio to become like Ponte di Rialto in Venice, crammed with tourist shops selling T-shirts and magnets, made-in-China stuff and other low-quality non -indigenous products. It would have destroyed the soul of my city.”

So much of Europe’s soul is being destroyed as unreal cities take the place of great cultural centres that are so precious not only to Europeans but every person with sound sense and a love of the arts throughout the world.

The enemy of Europe is no longer without.

The enemies of Europe are safe and sound and within.

Nardella, who currently heads the lobby uniting European mayors, said that he had hoped Covid and social distancing would have dampened the risk of over-tourism.

Not a bit of it.

“Instead, it just worsened once the pandemic ended. People got into a travel- frenzy and it was wild everywhere.”

He added: “It is our responsibility to protect the cultural and architectural identity of the old districts. I waged battles against landlords who exploited so many of those holiday rentals damaging Florence.”

The Mafia is but one enemy in Venice. There are dozens of others – most of them foreign tourist company owners who stop at nothing to make fortunes out of one of the world’s cultural hot-spots (Picture: Trevor Grundy)

 

The voice of Dario Nardella is loud, strong and reaches out across Europe.

Thank the lord above for that.

Millions of words in specialist academic magazines appear every year warning us  about the damaging impact un-regulated mass tourism is having on Europe.

Now, pick up a Sunday paper and see where you should be heading for your end of winter, start of spring and in to the depths of summer, autumn and Christmas holidays.

And how much that will cost if you have a partner and children.

Yes, when it come to the control of the flying hordes of men and women nothing can be heard apart from thre voices of furious men, women and children thrown out of the homes where most were born to make way for rich holiday-makers from other sides of their world.

This lack of action is as damaging as man’s inability to take action to control climate change.

Ordinary people used to live within a mile or so of the the centre of Venice. But now homes occupied by working-class Venetians are being taken over by holiday/tourist companies and artisans have to bus in , bike in, or walk in to a city  dominated by foreigners and their luxury holiday homes and hotels (Picture: Trevor Grundy)

As one concerned observer in Venice told me, “We must act fast. We must act now. Our new overlords are no longer foreign masters. They are local and even more bloodsucking. They are not like the people who conquered us centuries ago. They are worse. Much worse. In their time, local people were kept out of the palaces of their overlords. Today, local people who have lived in Venice all their lives, have to move far away to have roofs over their heads as hundreds, maybe soon thousands, of chickencoop blocks take over our seafronts. Soon our countryside dwellings will have to be renovated so they can be turned into expensive holiday homes.”

And this is happening in so many parts of Europe.

Tune into what is happening in Rome, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Malta Sicily, Mallorca, Greece, Crete, Croatia.

They leave their homes slim and pale but return home fat and orange

 

This short piece started with a quote from Horace.

Let it end with another which is a call for action not tomorrow or the next day but now.

Let it be a motto for those who love and care about Europe as it was and as it should be.

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero (Seize the day for it is ripe, trusting as little in tomorrow.)

 

TREVOR GRUNDY edited Africa Travel News in Harare, Zimbabwe when it was made the official magazine of the tourism wing of the nine-nation Southern African Development Community  (SADC) in the mid-1990s.