TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/072991/0729003.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.3 KB | 194 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 30

TOURISM

Elbow-to-Elbow at the Louvre


Overcrowding, pollution and plain incivility have become Europe'
unwelcome summer guests

By MARGUERITE JOHNSON -- Reported by Anne Constable/London,
Leonora Dodsworth/Rome and Victoria Foote-Greenwell/Paris


    Costantino Federico, the mayor of Capri, has had enough.
The hordes of tourists who inundate the Mediterranean isle
every summer will no longer be permitted to lounge around the
famed piazzetta. Nor can they camp outdoors in sleeping bags,
walk around in noisy wooden sandals or loiter bare-torsoed in
public places. Farther north, on the island of Ponza, a favorite
vacation spot for Romans, officials have banned automobiles
until the end of August. The last straw, say residents, was the
hundreds of cars that rolled off the ferries from the mainland
every day last summer, choking the narrow roads and causing
loathsome pollution and noise.

    The prehistoric Lascaux caves in France's Dordogne region
were closed in 1963 because the presence of tourists was
destroying the 17,000-year-old paintings on their walls. Now
Lascaux II, a replica built nearby in 1983 to give visitors a
sense of the Cro-Magnon artwork, has become so overcrowded that
entry is limited to 2,000 a day. The great Cathedral of Notre
Dame in the heart of Paris has yet to take such extreme
measures, but it may soon have to: more than 11.5 million people
visited the church last year to admire its Gothic architecture
and rose windows.

    Such throngs not only create wear and tear on the
cathedral floor but, with that many people simply breathing,
even raise the humidity to damaging levels. "I've actually seen
rivulets of condensation running down the stained-glass
windows," says Christian Dupavillon, director of patrimony for
the French Ministry of Culture. Even the tourist industry is
alarmed. "Will we have to create a Notre Dame II similar to the
replica they were forced to build at Lascaux?" asked the trade
daily Le Quotidien de Tourisme in an editorial.

    Britain's most hallowed sites are having similar problems.
The dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London announced that
visitors will have to pay a $3.25 entrance fee, after the church
had to spend $150,000 to repair its rare black-and-gold marble
floor. The surface had been damaged by salt and grit tracked in
by tourists wearing sneakers. And forget about stopping at
Westminster Abbey, even on a Sunday morning, for a few quiet
moments of prayer. "Now it's like Harrods three days before
Christmas," says cultural historian John Julius Norwich.
"Salisbury Cathedral is just as bad. The whole atmosphere is
gone. You can't see anything, and people are talking in 20
different languages."

    From the cobblestoned streets of Bath, where angry Britons
turned hoses on tour buses grinding through their neighborhoods
last summer, to the sinking shores of Venice, where visitors on
a summer Sunday often number 100,000, overcrowding, pollution
and plain incivility have become unwelcome guests. Europeans in
particular are realizing that tourism has got out of hand. This
year alone more than 400 million people around the globe will
travel abroad. By the year 2000, the number will be 650 million.
And those figures do not include the millions who go
sight-seeing in their own countries.

    In times past, putting up with litter, noxious fumes and
bad manners seemed an acceptable price to pay for the revenue
tourism brought in and the jobs it created. A big business it
is too. In Britain the tourist industry contributed $39 billion
to the economy last year. Italy took in $21 billion. France, the
world's second most favored destination after the U.S.,
collected $17.7 billion from tourism, more than it earned from
agriculture or arms. For poorer countries like Greece, tourism
is the main source of foreign exchange, so a drop in the number
of visitors, which is feared this year because of the gulf war
and the crisis in neighboring Yugoslavia, is economically
painful.

    But increasingly, ordinary citizens as well as public
officials and cultural guardians are beginning to believe that
the costs may outweigh the benefits. Jobs generated by tourism
in hotels, restaurants and parks, while in demand among local
people, are usually at the low end of the pay scale. The biggest
beneficiaries of tourist spending are developers and owners, who
often take their profits out of town and, if they are
foreigners, out of the country as well. Even the tourist
industry is starting to recognize that threatened treasures must
be protected or business will not survive. As London's Daily
Telegraph put it in an editorial, "Unless tourism is brought
under firmer discipline, it will destroy itself. We think we are
within measurable distance of killing the goose which lays the
golden eggs."

    In point of fact, monuments and scenic spots all over
Britain are under virtual siege, with 18 million visitors
pouring in every year. In the Lake District the National Trust
has spent more than $2 million repairing erosion of public
footpaths. Residents of Bath have trouble reaching their shops
on summer Saturdays because of tourists descending on the town
to see the Royal Crescent and the Roman baths. In North Devon
370,000 visitors a year overwhelm the picturesque harbor of
Clovelly (pop. 400). Sometimes they even wander into private
homes.

    The story is much the same elsewhere in Europe. Alpine
forests in Austria and Switzerland have been denuded to make way
for ski runs and cable cars. For the Conservatoire du Littoral,
the French agency charged with preserving the Mediterranean
coastline, the grossly overdeveloped French Riviera is the
sorriest example of tourism gone awry. Not only has the
coastline been ravaged by urbanization and the sea severely
polluted, but tourism was down 30% last year from 1989.
Pollution and overcrowding also figured in a similar drop in
tourist revenues in Spain.

    Greece took steps years ago to halt further deterioration
of its antiquities. Planes are barred from flying over Athens,
and tourists are no longer permitted to walk into the
Parthenon, Athena's exquisite temple atop the Acropolis. Still,
with as many as 6,000 visitors a day clambering up the
Acropolis, some parts of its rock have become so slippery and
dangerous that officials have had to cover them with concrete.
Marble treasures in the museum have been blackened by tourists'
greasy hands. Officialdom can also be difficult: although buses
have not been allowed on the Acropolis since the mid-1970s, it
took until this year to persuade the mayor that it was just as
bad to let them park at the foot of the hill, since many drivers
leave their motors running to keep the air conditioning going.

    Conservationists and local residents have managed to stop
some developments. Last summer scores of people took to
France's Gardon River in canoes to protest a government project
that would have brought motorized trains, parking lots, a
museum and even a shopping arcade close to the historic Pont du
Gard, a 2,000-year-old Roman aqueduct near Remoulins. The Pont
already draws more than 2 million visitors a year. Historians,
environmentalists and locals also joined forces against a
commercial project planned for Chambord, one of the most
illustrious of the Loire Valley chateaus. The castle was
scheduled to become the site of a "Renaissance" theme park, with
two hotels, shops, an artificial lake and a tower with a
revolving restaurant at the top.

    The solutions, like the problems, are rarely simple. At
Stonehenge, the English Heritage, a commission created to help
preserve ancient monuments, is seeking to close a public highway
to reduce pollution and enhance the site. But residents are up
in arms because the closure will force them out of their way to
shop. "There is a thing worth preserving as much as Stonehenge
-- and that is community life," says Amy Hall, a resident. "If
we lived in the South American jungle, you'd be saying, `Save
the natives.' We're the natives here." The Rev. Robert Runcie,
retired Archbishop of Canterbury, goes even further, charging
that tourism "creates pollution, prostitution, economic
exploitation and disregard for indigenous life-styles."

    Something has indeed been lost. Only 10 years ago,
travelers in Greece or Turkey would have been invited into
peasant homes, offered an ouzo or a handful of ripe plums. Even
in remote villages now, such hospitality -- the essence of what
travel to another culture is about -- is pretty much a thing of
the past. Says historian Norwich: "Tourism brutalizes.
Self-respect gives way to servility, good manners to surliness,
and hospitality to cupidity and suspicion." To try to educate
tourists to be more sensitive travelers, the World Wildlife Fund
has put out a series of booklets on ways to avoid abusing the
environment.

    For those who feel guilty about lying on a Mediterranean
beach, there are other things to do. The British travel firm of
Eco Holidays, for example, is offering a trip to assist in
woodland preservation in Romania. But John Button, author of The
Green Guide to England, may have the ultimate solution. The
"truly aware," says he, will not go on holiday at all.