Tourist overload: Some world destinations want more visitors - and some really, really don't

A gondolier with tourists on the Canal Grande, with the Rioalto bridge in the background, on June 9 in Venice. The city of around 55,000 is swarmed by 20 million tourists each year. (Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images)

Summer is one of the four seasons of the temperate zones. It is the warmest of them. Follow spring and precede autumn. Summer is characterized by the days are longer and the nights are shorter. Astronomically, the summer solstice marks the beginning of this season, and the autumn equinox marks the end of this season and the beginning of autumn.

It should be noted that, in different cultures, the seasons begin on different dates, based on astronomical or meteorological phenomena. However, when summer occurs in the southern hemisphere it is winter in the northern hemisphere. As observed, summer can be boreal, when it occurs in the northern hemisphere, or austral, when it occurs in the southern hemisphere.

That being the case, summer officially begins in the northern hemisphere tomorrow. Therefore, it is necessary to mention that currently, vacationers are becoming a problem throughout the year. Being that international tourism has grown from around 25 million leisure travelers a year in 1950, to 1,400 million in 2018.

Too many visitors

There is no doubt that this trend is currently driven by the expansion of the world’s middle class and air travel increasingly cheaper so it shows no signs of slowing down.

A clear example of this is that cruise traffic is forecast to affect at least 30 million passengers in 2019, 1.5 million more people than the previous year, with 18 more massive vessels joining the fleets of the company. In this way, it is clear that our collective desire to see the world is causing a lot of problems.

That being the case, some places of beauty have too many visitors. As Barcelona, a city of 1.6 million inhabitants, is dealing with an annual influx of 30 million people. Amsterdam, which has less than one million residents, received 18 million visitors in 2018 and expects a crowd of 42 million by 2030. And Venice, which has been reduced to a full-time population of about 55,000, is overrun. by 20 million people each year.

It is important to note that ten European cities have written a joint letter to the EU requesting regulations at the continental level to stop the “explosive growth” of the type of short-term private vacation rentals provided by the website. Berlin has 22,500 ads. Barcelona, 18,000. And Paris, just under 60,000.

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Source: Jonathon Gatehouse | The National Today — CBC News