Greece has issued a denial over facing a “crisis” as it reassured UK tourists. Holidaymakers have been reassured by European Union holiday hotspot Greece amid protests in places like Santorini over the number of UK tourists heading there.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece’s prime minister, acknowledged the problems some resorts were facing but denied the county faces an overtourism crisis. During a discussion at the Reimagine Tourism in Greece conference, he said: “Greece does not have an overtourism problem.
“Rather, it faces the challenge of concentrated tourist activity in specific destinations for a few months of the year. In certain Aegean islands, during peak months, the infrastructure is being stretched.” He then added: “With better infrastructure, theoretically, we could accommodate more tourists.”
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Greece’s government is planning to charge a €20 (£17) per person port tax during the peak summer months for passengers arriving both at Santorini and Mykonos. “A significant part of this specific revenue will return to the local communities,” the Prime Minister promised.
“It is important for them to be better organised, to support their infrastructure against the burden they receive every summer.” With more than 3.4 million tourists expected to visit the Cycladic hotspot this year, Nikos Zorzos called for urgent action to stop a construction spree that risks spurring the island’s ruination.
“We live in a place of barely 25,000 souls and we don’t need any more hotels or any more rented rooms,” he told the Guardian. “If you destroy the landscape, one as rich as ours, you destroy the very reason people come here in the first place.”
“The environment is our home and destroying it we harm ourselves,” he said. “We should know from the past: no ancient civilisation that respected beauty ever declined.” “Mass tourism really took off in the 1990s and that’s when you began to see change,” he said.
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