Overtourism - what is it, what are its consequences, and how to solve the problem?

[zakiyatasnim]

The Louvre was closed at the end of May this year. Museum staff said that the crowding of people in the halls with the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo made these places unsafe. “The Louvre is suffocating,” they said in their statement, which also mentioned the museum’s “complete inability” to cope with the large number of visitors.



Elsewhere on the planet, climbers lined up on a razor-sharp ridge to climb Mount Everest. They looked as if they had decided to register their car during their lunch break. A photo of the queue went viral, and about a dozen climbers died, with surviving guides claiming that the crowding on the world’s highest peak was a major, if not the only, reason for the deaths.


Queue for Everest

Such cases are not isolated. Crowds of Instagram bloggers violated public safety during the California poppy super-bloom. An “extreme ecological crisis” provoked a “summer of action” against visitors to the Spanish island of Mallorca. Barcelona, ​​Venice, Reykjavik and Dubrovnik experienced flooding. Beaches in Thailand, Mexico and the Philippines are being destroyed. Natural wonders from the Sierra Nevada to the Andes are in danger. Religious monuments from Cambodia to India and Rome too.


Pillar formations near Stonehenge

This phenomenon is known as overtourism, and it has suddenly spread around the world. A confluence of macroeconomic factors and changing business trends has led to more and more people congregating in popular destinations. This has led to environmental degradation, dangerous situations, and the impoverishment of local residents. Cities turkey number data around the world are asking themselves the same question: can something be done about their excess visitor numbers?

Of course, locals have been complaining about tourists since time immemorial, and travelers themselves have long shown disrespect for landmarks, both natural and man-made. However, tourism was previously accessible to a much smaller number of people. In the early 19th century, personal travel was considered the privilege of only “wealthy nobles and educated professionals,” for whom tourism was “a demonstrative expression of their social class, which implied power, status, money, and leisure.” Mass tourism only began to develop in the 1840s and grew along with the middle class.

then overtourism is its crazy cousin: deaths from selfie sticks, buffet ships stopping at historic ports, bachelor parties ending in damage to other people's property, online broadcasts of the destruction of fragile natural habitats, and so on. Too many people choose popular destinations: Barcelona, ​​with its 1.6 million inhabitants, receives 30 million tourists annually, Venice, with its 50,000 inhabitants, receives 20 million tourists.