By Niki Kitsantonis
With the treasures of its history, the beauty of its islands and the golden sands of its beaches, Greece offers tourists many reasons to visit. But a seemingly endless influx in recent years has caused headaches at some of its most popular destinations.
So earlier this month, its prime minister proposed an array of measures aimed at curbing some effects of the growing crowds.
The changes include hefty increases in docking fees for cruise ships at some of Greece’s most popular islands, and limits in daily cruise ship arrivals. The rules aim to reduce the strain that the vacation industry places on communities and echo a pushback against overtourism in several other major European destinations.
“Tourism supports the economy with significant resources and jobs, but it has its own particular social impact,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said during his annual state of the economy speech in Thessaloniki on Sept. 7. He added that he was “very concerned about the image on some of our islands some months of the year due to cruise ships.”
More details will be announced this week, he said.
Discontent over tourism has flared across Europe since pandemic-related travel restrictions receded. In April, Venice introduced an entry fee of 5 euros, about $5.50, on certain days. In July, protesters in Barcelona, Spain, marched in exasperation with tourist numbers.
And after those cities diverted cruises from busy ports, officials in Amsterdam decided to cut cruise traffic in half by 2026, before eventually closing its terminal, citing worries about overcrowding and pollution.
The issue carries particularly high stakes in Greece, where tourism accounts for about one-fifth of economic output. A record 33 million people visited last year, according to the Bank of Greece, which said numbers were up another 15.5% in the first half of 2024.
Vacation rentals and foreign buyers have also driven home prices to a level that many locals say they struggle to afford on many islands, while a wave of villa construction has contributed to water shortages.
“We’ve had yet another extremely successful tourism year,” Mitsotakis said, noting that the sector was going “from record to record.”
To address overcrowding, disembarkation fees for cruises would be increased, he said, with larger rises for particularly popular islands like Mykonos and Santorini, where authorities and residents have been pushing for constraints.
Fees will rise to 20 euros for those islands during the high season, he said at a news conference on Sept. 8, a steep hike from the current charge of 35 cents for Santorini. Some of the additional revenue will go toward local infrastructure, he said.
The government will also increase a lodging tax paid by hotels and rental accommodations on the islands, with those proceeds going toward local communities to help them during the peak season, Mitsotakis said.
And property owners who offer long-term leases, rather than the short-term rentals generally given to international visitors, will be exempt from paying rental tax for three years, he said.
Mitsotakis also heralded restrictions, to be announced in coming weeks, on runaway construction on the most overdeveloped islands, apparently targeting vacation homes. “Let’s take action and put the brakes, wherever needed, on islands where we believe that the situation has reached a point that the infrastructure is essentially being tested,” he told reporters.
The cruise industry is booming in Greece, with a projected increase of 20% in ship arrivals this year, totaling more than 8 million passengers, according to Giorgos Koubenas, president of Greece’s union of cruise-ship owners, who said revenues this year were projected at 2 billion euros.
Santorini, with its volcanic beaches and dramatic caldera, is Greece’s most popular cruise destination, with 1.3 million cruise visitors last year, according to the Hellenic Ports Association. An official there provoked an angry backlash on a particularly busy July day when he urged residents — population 15,500 — to stay home to make way for an expected 17,000 visitors.
The mayor, Nikos Zorzos, said authorities did what they could to keep daily visitors under 8,000, but that itineraries were set two years in advance, causing some “very difficult days.”
“It’s important that each island has the ability to regulate the situation locally,” he said, “that local authorities have control in such significant issues that directly influence the daily lives of residents.”
Some residents of smaller islands, however, say they fear that restrictions will push the problems of cruise traffic onto them.
“I’m very worried,” said Thodoris Halaris, a 64-year-old resident of Amorgos, an island of about 2,000 that received its first large cruise ship last month. Cruises risk crowding out the regular visitors he rents to, he said, and don’t suit the island’s relatively small beaches.
“It’s like the theater of the absurd,” he said. “Fifty people swimming on a beach and a 250-meter cruise ship docked in front of them.”
Konstantinos Revinthis, the mayor of Serifos, said he was persuaded to oppose cruise visits after a medium-size liner brought some 2,000 passengers to his island of roughly 1,000.
“We don’t have the infrastructure to host so many people,” he said.
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