Cinque Terre, located in the Liguria region of Italy, is the latest tourist destination that has been forced to put a cap on tourists in a bid to preserve the integrity of its natural surroundings in the wake of explosive visitor numbers over the last few years.
In 2011, following a torrential rainfall that battered the area, Cinque Terre received 400,000 visitors. That number rebounded to 2.5 million last year, thanks in large part to docking cruise ships which offload hundreds of thousands of day-tripping visitors in one go.
Last week, a spokesman for the national park and UNESCO World Heritage Site announced that as of this summer, visitors will have to buy an advance ticket online in order to gain access to the cliffside trails which connect the five fishing villages.
The aim is to limit the number of tourists from 2.5 million a year, to 1.5 million.
Cinque Terre is the latest environmentally sensitive area to bear the brunt of mass tourism with the proliferation of low-budget airlines, behemoth ocean vessels and increasingly mobile tourists.
Here are a few other destinations that have either implemented tourist caps or are considering it.
Machu Picchu
In a bid to preserve and protect Peru’s fabled and ancient, mountaintop ruins, the country has developed a new reconceptualization project that imposes time limits as a means to control crowd flow and requires visitors to hire an official guide for the trail. For years experts warned that the UNESCO World Heritage Site was at risk of irreversible damage and degradation from unsustainable tourist numbers. If you want to hike to the top, the government now limits access to the classic Inca Trail to 500 permits a day. That includes support staff, such as cooks, porters and guides, further reducing the number to about 200.
Antarctica
To protect one of the few, final frontiers unspoiled by human activity and tourism, The Antarctic Treaty restricts ships with more than 500 passengers from landing sites. Vessels are also restricted to no more than one landing per site, with a maximum of 100 passengers allowed on shore at a time. A ratio of one guide to 20 passengers must also be maintained while ashore.
Barcelona
Last summer, Barcelona’s newly elected mayor Ada Colau made international headlines after announcing plans to curb explosive tourism numbers by imposing a freeze on the development of new hotels and tourist apartments, and creating a preventative policy pre-empting saturation problems before they occur.
Galapagos Islands
Described as a “living museum and showcase of evolution,” the collection of 19 islands which make up the Galapagos Islands groaned under the pressure of unsustainable tourism numbers over the years, putting it on the United Nations’ list of endangered heritage sites. Today, a conservation program has successfully helped it make a solid recovery. To visit, tourists must now be accompanied by a licensed Galapagos National Park Guide and abide by strict rules when visiting the area. Camping is also allowed in only a handful of authorised areas, and requires a permit from park officials.
Yosemite National Park
To protect one of America’s most beautiful national treasures, the US National Park Service announced measures to cap visitor numbers to 18,710 a day, and 21,000 visitors a day during peak seasons back in 2014. Yosemite was the fourth most visited national park in the US in 2015, and is best known for its waterfalls, valleys, meadows, ancient sequoias, and vast wilderness. To ease congestion and reduce car-related pollution, park officials also added buses to shuttle large numbers of visitors at once.
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