Guest practices: See how towns around the world are turning tourists politely away
Is there a way to save a place from its own beauty before it is all gone? We could learn from approaches in use in Venice, Vermont, Austria, Athens, Mallorca.
At least 28,000 cars were caught in the snaking jam on the road from Manali to the Atal Tunnel, in Himachal Pradesh, on Christmas Eve. For three years now, new infrastructure has been driving more tourists to such hotspots, and beyond, to once-remote mountain towns such as Hanle.
Is there a way to tackle the flood; turn people politely away; save a town from its own beauty before it is all gone? The best tips, it would seem, come from other tiny towns facing seasonal invasions.
In some, drastic measures are being taken, including paid day passes and a cap on visitors. In others, subversive signage put up by activists is getting evocative messages across. Some are simply finding the most popular selfie points and blocking them off with a fence.
First, a new term for it all.
The Spanish media has a word for the feeling of helplessness caused by over-tourism. “Turismofobia” has been in use since the late-Aughts, coined in response to the steady stream of tourists who stop to pose beside the country’s colourful houses, near residents’ blooming window-boxes, in the middle of cobbled streets.
Italy is pushing back with more than words. In 2022, a new law made it illegal for any more guest houses or hotels to open in the province of Alto Adige, famous for its Dolomite mountains and glacial lakes, unless an existing establishment shut.
“We reached the limit of our resources, we had problems with traffic, and residents have difficulty finding places to live,” tourism minister Arnold Schuler told CNN last year.
Elsewhere in the country, starting this spring, Venice will begin to charge day-trippers an entry fee of 5 Euro (about ₹450).
Venice’s municipal authorities are concerned that the annual flood of tourists could overburden the city’s infrastructure, already overburdened and struggling. Unesco had in fact threatened to move the city, which is a world heritage site, to its endangered list, if action was not taken. The UN body cited “irreversible” damage from overwhelming tourism, overdevelopment and rising sea levels due to climate change.
In Greece, in September, the government began trying out new caps on how many people could enter the Acropolis per hour. A limit of 20,000 a day is expected to come into effect permanently on April 1.
In the US town of Pomfret (pop. 900) in Vermont, leaf-peepers had trickled in for years, to capture the beauty of the red and orange autumn foliage. Then photographs of a farm called Sleepy Hollow, which sits at the end of a winding road lined with maple trees, went viral and the trickle turned into a flood.
Tourists began seeking the farm out for Instagram posts, clambering over its fence, ignoring “No Trespassing” signs. Residents complained to town authorities that roads had been damaged and gardens trampled. Tourists had defecated on private property. Others had set up makeshift booths for costume swaps between photoshoots.
Last year, before the autumn leaves began to turn, town officials voted to close the road leading to Sleepy Hollow Farm to non-residents between September and October. A GoFundMe page has since raised over $16,000 for the additional law enforcement personnel that will be needed to patrol the area in these months.
“Around the world, people are becoming more aware of when they need to pull the brakes on revenue and strike a balance between income and ecosystem,” says Smruti Koppikar, journalist and founder-editor of Question of Cities, an online journal and forum that examines the sustainability of our built environments. “This flows from a larger understanding of placemaking, which is often written into urban policies of international cities. They approach city-making and urbanisation with a larger goal in sight which involves both people and nature.”
Data is integral too, Koppikar says. In Venice, information on the number of day passes issued is expected to help with waste-management planning. “Data sharing is equally important,” says Koppikar. “If local governments could send out advisories once Indian hill stations start filling up, at the start of a long weekend, we probably wouldn’t see cars stuck for hours in snaking queues right outside these hotspots.”
Instead, even when there is a disruption to local ecosystems on an environmental and social level due to tourism, there is a two-tiered barrier to action. “Locals in the hill stations that are swamped with tourists don’t always express their dismay because it means going against the Indian tradition of hospitality,” she says. “And, even if they do raise their voices, they are not equipped with the institutional mechanisms to fight for a different way forward.”
Local governments and policymakers are not drawn from the local population in the way of towns as tiny as Pomfret. The needs then become less immediate to the administration, and there is room for revenue-linked priorities to seep back in.
The smaller the population, the easier it seems to be to make simple, small changes that can add up to send a message and make an incremental difference.
In the scenic Italian fishing village of Portofino, for instance, certain areas were marked as red zones or “no waiting” areas last summer, to discourage strolling tourists from stopping, causing a noisy nuisance, or creating bottlenecks while trying to get the perfect selfie against the harbour.
As a pilot project, the Austrian village of Hallstatt, a Unesco-protected site with picture-postcard views of lakeside Alpine houses set against snow-capped mountains, erected a wooden fence at one of its famous viewpoints, to discourage selfie-takers.
In a subversive and unofficial experiment, activists in Mallorca, Spain, put up “warning signs” in English that said jellyfish had been spotted on the seashore, falling rocks were a threat, and there was sewage contamination, at certain beaches. Scrawled in smaller text was another message, in Catalan. The real danger is overcrowding, it said.
At least 28,000 cars were caught in the snaking jam on the road from Manali to the Atal Tunnel, in Himachal Pradesh, on Christmas Eve. For three years now, new infrastructure has been driving more tourists to such hotspots, and beyond, to once-remote mountain towns such as Hanle.
Is there a way to tackle the flood; turn people politely away; save a town from its own beauty before it is all gone? The best tips, it would seem, come from other tiny towns facing seasonal invasions.
In some, drastic measures are being taken, including paid day passes and a cap on visitors. In others, subversive signage put up by activists is getting evocative messages across. Some are simply finding the most popular selfie points and blocking them off with a fence.
First, a new term for it all.
The Spanish media has a word for the feeling of helplessness caused by over-tourism. “Turismofobia” has been in use since the late-Aughts, coined in response to the steady stream of tourists who stop to pose beside the country’s colourful houses, near residents’ blooming window-boxes, in the middle of cobbled streets.
Italy is pushing back with more than words. In 2022, a new law made it illegal for any more guest houses or hotels to open in the province of Alto Adige, famous for its Dolomite mountains and glacial lakes, unless an existing establishment shut.
“We reached the limit of our resources, we had problems with traffic, and residents have difficulty finding places to live,” tourism minister Arnold Schuler told CNN last year.
Elsewhere in the country, starting this spring, Venice will begin to charge day-trippers an entry fee of 5 Euro (about ₹450).
Venice’s municipal authorities are concerned that the annual flood of tourists could overburden the city’s infrastructure, already overburdened and struggling. Unesco had in fact threatened to move the city, which is a world heritage site, to its endangered list, if action was not taken. The UN body cited “irreversible” damage from overwhelming tourism, overdevelopment and rising sea levels due to climate change.
In Greece, in September, the government began trying out new caps on how many people could enter the Acropolis per hour. A limit of 20,000 a day is expected to come into effect permanently on April 1.
In the US town of Pomfret (pop. 900) in Vermont, leaf-peepers had trickled in for years, to capture the beauty of the red and orange autumn foliage. Then photographs of a farm called Sleepy Hollow, which sits at the end of a winding road lined with maple trees, went viral and the trickle turned into a flood.
Tourists began seeking the farm out for Instagram posts, clambering over its fence, ignoring “No Trespassing” signs. Residents complained to town authorities that roads had been damaged and gardens trampled. Tourists had defecated on private property. Others had set up makeshift booths for costume swaps between photoshoots.
Last year, before the autumn leaves began to turn, town officials voted to close the road leading to Sleepy Hollow Farm to non-residents between September and October. A GoFundMe page has since raised over $16,000 for the additional law enforcement personnel that will be needed to patrol the area in these months.
“Around the world, people are becoming more aware of when they need to pull the brakes on revenue and strike a balance between income and ecosystem,” says Smruti Koppikar, journalist and founder-editor of Question of Cities, an online journal and forum that examines the sustainability of our built environments. “This flows from a larger understanding of placemaking, which is often written into urban policies of international cities. They approach city-making and urbanisation with a larger goal in sight which involves both people and nature.”
Data is integral too, Koppikar says. In Venice, information on the number of day passes issued is expected to help with waste-management planning. “Data sharing is equally important,” says Koppikar. “If local governments could send out advisories once Indian hill stations start filling up, at the start of a long weekend, we probably wouldn’t see cars stuck for hours in snaking queues right outside these hotspots.”
Instead, even when there is a disruption to local ecosystems on an environmental and social level due to tourism, there is a two-tiered barrier to action. “Locals in the hill stations that are swamped with tourists don’t always express their dismay because it means going against the Indian tradition of hospitality,” she says. “And, even if they do raise their voices, they are not equipped with the institutional mechanisms to fight for a different way forward.”
Local governments and policymakers are not drawn from the local population in the way of towns as tiny as Pomfret. The needs then become less immediate to the administration, and there is room for revenue-linked priorities to seep back in.
The smaller the population, the easier it seems to be to make simple, small changes that can add up to send a message and make an incremental difference.
In the scenic Italian fishing village of Portofino, for instance, certain areas were marked as red zones or “no waiting” areas last summer, to discourage strolling tourists from stopping, causing a noisy nuisance, or creating bottlenecks while trying to get the perfect selfie against the harbour.
As a pilot project, the Austrian village of Hallstatt, a Unesco-protected site with picture-postcard views of lakeside Alpine houses set against snow-capped mountains, erected a wooden fence at one of its famous viewpoints, to discourage selfie-takers.
In a subversive and unofficial experiment, activists in Mallorca, Spain, put up “warning signs” in English that said jellyfish had been spotted on the seashore, falling rocks were a threat, and there was sewage contamination, at certain beaches. Scrawled in smaller text was another message, in Catalan. The real danger is overcrowding, it said.
