Day-trippers will have to pay €5 to visit Italian city under scheme designed to protect it from excess tourism
Authorities in Venice have been accused of transforming the famous lagoon city into a “theme park” as a long-mooted entrance fee for day trippers comes into force.
Venice is the first major city in the world to enact such a scheme. The €5 (£4.30) charge, which comes into force today, is aimed at protecting the Unesco world heritage site from the effects of excessive tourism by deterring day trippers and, according to the mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, making the city “livable” again.
But several residents’ committees and associations have planned protests for Thursday, arguing that the fee will do nothing to resolve the issue.
“I can tell you that almost the entire city is against it,” claimed Matteo Secchi, who leads Venessia.com, a residents’ activist group. “You can’t impose an entrance fee to a city; all they’re doing is transforming it into a theme park. This is a bad image for Venice … I mean, are we joking?”
I find it surprising that it’s unpopular with the residents
My (admittedly naive) understanding was that tourism keeps increasing and there’s no way to build more space, so Venice has become overcrowded and is potentially at risk of sinking?
Sure it’s not great to have to impose a restriction like this, but there aren’t many other ways to reduce the number of people going to a place that they want to go to.
Other than the poor optics of charging entrance as if it’s a theme park, the fee might also embolden some of the more obnoxious tourists in behaving like they would at an ACTUAL theme park rather than how they would as guests in a “real” city, in order to “get their money’s worth”.
Thing is, €5 isn’t all that much. I’m not sure who this is going to deter other than shoestring backpackers and people who fly RyanAir. I’d fully expect that price to increase in the future.
My guess is that the term “residents” actually refers to greedy business and hotel owners which are the reason this rule is necessary in the first place.
So they are just attempting to bully the worst kind of tourists out which is totally fair.
Yeah it reads like they do want less tourists but don’t agree with the way they are handling it. Maybe a pride thing, with the theme park comment.
Maybe the inland residents the ones that are protesting… what we call Venice doesent look to have a lot of residents apart from some particular places
I suspect it’s more unpopular with souvenir shop owners than anyone else.