Updated September 9, 2024 at 4:40 p.m.*
THERA — Nikos Zorzos may not look it, but he’s fuming. Affable and smiley, the mayor of Santorini suddenly spreads his arms in a sign of helplessness on this Sunday in June. “I feel like a prisoner. I want to change things, but I can’t,” he explains, sinking into a seat in his office. For more than 10 years, he has been warning in vain against the dangers of overtourism in Greece.
Born and raised in Santorini, Zoros, 64, doesn’t recognize his island anymore. Once poor and cut off from the rest of the world, this small island in the Aegean sea has become one of the world’s most famous tourist destinations. Over the past 60 years, its steep cliffs, volcanic scenery and sunsets have attracted an endless streams of visitors. With them came prosperity. But in recent years, the situation has spiraled out of control.
Since 2012, Zoros has been repeating — to anyone who will listen — that the island is “saturated.” Last year, more than one out of 10 tourists coming to Greece stopped in Santorini, a total of 3.4 million people. The frenetic construction of hotels, rental homes and large luxury real estate complexes has disfigured the island’s landscape.
In summer, the population density — more than 1,000 people per square kilometer — makes it difficult to supply water and electricity. Trash piles up. Rush hour traffic jams are on par with those in Athens. Soaring prices make it impossible for essential workers (doctors, teachers, firemen, police) to find accommodation. The island has become inaccessible to the vast majority of Greeks.
On Sunday, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced a plan to impose a 20-euro levy on cruise ship visitors in Santorini and Mykonos, in order to counter overtourism. The government’s plan will also include a regulation on the number of cruise ship arriving simultaneously, in an effort to protect the environment.
For Santorini’s 22,000 regular residents, the benefits of tourism are no longer enough to appease them. “The island has lost everything traditional about it, and it gets worse by the year,” says Kostas, who has run a traditional restaurant — one of the last remaining — for 18 years in Thera, Santorini’s capital.
Suffocating pressure
Even cruise ships have started to avoid the island that is said to have inspired Plato’s myth of Atlantis. In April, Princess Cruises announced that its “Sun Princess” will not stop on the island this summer, due to port congestion.
Santorini “is a problem,” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told Bloomberg in early June. But Santorini is not the only one.
The Greek islands, with their postcard of sun and sea, tavernas and whitewashed houses, are under “suffocating pressure,” according to the country’s Ombudsman. In a 170-page report published in June, the independent body warned that Greece “must not exhaust its potential, waste it and make our tourist destinations unattractive over time.”
Overtourism and its consequences — overconstruction, saturation of urban spaces, loss of identity and heritage, deterioration of quality of life for local residents — are to different extents a reality for the most popular Greek islands, including Mykonos, Amorgos, Rhodes, Corfou, Zakynthos and Tinos — in addition to Santorini.
We don’t need it at all.
At first glance, Piso Livadi appears to be shielded from all of this. The season has just started and tourists still manage to find a shady spot on the beach of this small port on the island of Paros, in the heart of the Cyclades. Along with 33 other islands, it forms the Aegean archipelago known the world over for its distinctive white houses with blue shutters.
But its quietness is deceiving. Paros is the most visited Greek island after Santorini and Mykonos. And once the expansion of its airport is completed, it could end up just like them. Soaring prices, traffic jams, water supply problems: here, too, summer overtourism has very real consequences.
Last year, Paros even made international headlines. Exasperated by the illegal occupation of the beaches by restaurateurs and beach bars, locals demonstrated angrily to demand free access to the beaches, as guaranteed by the Greek constitution. The “towel movement,” as the media called it, then spread across the country.
Prices explode
The state has since passed legislation, and Ilias Petrakis, one of the movement’s members says “we are very vigilant to ensure that the situation does not recur. But the beaches are just the tip of the iceberg.”
Paros is also one of areas that builds the most in Greece. According to Elstat, the Greek statistics institute, 470 building permits were issued on the island in 2023 — 750 including renovations and reparations — for a surface area of 66,603 m².
“Business has picked up strongly since 2017, today there are no more workers available,” says Patrick Tkatschenko while sitting at a café in Piso Livadi. A French real estate agent who has lived in Greece for some 30 years, he has frequented the island since 2010 and says that prices are “exploding.” A 200 m² house with four rooms now costs at least €1 million, twice as much as five years ago.
There is a cruel lack of land-use planning, and when it exists, it is not respected.
Yet the island is, at least in theory, protected by one of the strictest urbanism plans in Greece. Since 2012, the plan bans the construction of basements and second floors outside urban areas. Walls must be made of dry stone. And a landmark decision by the State Council two years ago forbids building on land not adjoining a legally recognized road. But “none of that is respected,” says Nicolas Stephanou, vice-president of the Friends of Paros association.
Over the past few years, drilling activities to build troglodyte houses in the mountains have multiplied, an activity that could more than double the island’s inhabited surface. Near the Santa Maria beach, the island’s most beautiful spot, hundreds of buildings have sprung up, despite the area’s protected status, classified as a “place of natural beauty” in 1975.
The 73rd five-star hotel
“Building laws are very weak and flexible in Greece. There is a cruel lack of land-use planning, and when it exists, it is not respected,” says Maria Karamanof, president of the Greek Chamber for Environment and Sustainability.
Following a decade of financial crisis, public services are now incapable of enforcing the law. “There are only three people covering the Aegean area for the environmental service, and four for the archeological service. They can’t possibly deal with all the requests, in most cases they don’t even reply,” says Simos Varias, deputy mayor of Paros.
Sometimes, however, the Greek authorities give their full approval. In Santorini, impressive geological formations overlook the black sand beach in the island’s south. Sculpted over centuries by ash, wind and rain, the hills of Vlychada are one of the most spectacular remains of the volcanic eruption that struck the island in 1600 B.C.
Vlychada should be protected from all human activities and transformed into a national park.
This is where the Greek government has approved the construction of a five-star hotel. Villas with suites and swimming pools, 166 beds, a surface of 16,500 m². The 67.5 euro million project contributes to making Greece one of the “investment protagonists of the 21st century,” Greek Development Minister Adonis Georgiadis says with pride.
Mayor Zorzos, on the other hand, is furious. Some 20% of the island’s surface iis already covered in concrete. This five-star hotel — Santorini’s 73rd — will put additional stress on water demand, which has tripled in 10 years, and on the electricity needs, which have doubled in five years.
“We don’t need it at all,” Zorzos says. “Vlychada is a unique environment, and it should be protected from all human activities and transformed into a national park.”
He tried to oppose the project, but there was nothing he could do. In the highly centralized Greek state, construction permits of this relevance are issued in Athens, by the ministries of Environment and Development. The latter granted the project “strategic investment” status, a procedure that not only cuts through the red tape of Greece’s cumbersome bureaucracy, but above all allows it to bypass environmental and urban-planning laws.
For the money
“During the decade of crisis, construction-friendly laws were passed to attract investors, including the ‘strategic investment’ law,” says Ioannis Spilanis, professor at the University of the Aegean and founder of the Observatory for Sustainable Tourism. “Candidates submit applications for projects that do not respect any legislative framework, and may even benefit from public funding. What is the strategy, if not to make money?”
While the Greek government now talks about “sustainability” in its speeches, development often takes precedence over all other considerations, say environmental associations and scientists. With a total contribution of between 62.8 and 75.6 billion euros (28.5 and 34% of GDP) in 2023, tourism is the single biggest contributor to the Greek economy.
We can still save what can be saved.
Last year’s all-time record of 33 million visitors enabled above-average economic growth (2.2%, well above the eurozone average) and represented two out of five jobs in the labor market — if we consider travel agencies, real estate agencies, investment companies, rental services and the like.
But this model may have now passed its limit. Last year, international arrivals at the Santorini airport were down 8.7%, while accommodation sales fell by 3% — in Mykonos, the declines were 5.2% and 10% respectively.
Images of crowded streets in the heat of the day have made the rounds on social networks, and high prices are a deterrent. For the locals, a belated awareness is emerging.
“A large part of the population now understands the obvious, with all that’s happening today,” says Zorzos, who was reelected last fall after four years of a pro-development mayor. During an assembly on overtourism a few weeks ago, Zoros and the president of the federation of hotel managers publicly pledged not to build another bed on the island. From here, “we can still save what can be saved,” he believes.
*Originally published July 29, 2024, this article was updated Sep. 9, 2024 following the announcement of a cruise ship tax by the Greek Prime Minister.
