Venetians Are Revolting …

Last week saw hundreds of angry Venetian demonstrators taking to the water in Venice to protest AGAIN against cruise ships as the situation reached a new height

Protesters with flares used gondolas and small boats to prevent cruise ships from passing through Venice lagoon 

At the height of the summer up to 30,000 cruise ship passengers disembark in Venice every day and local people claim this is ruining their city environmentally and culturally.

This is a protest that has been rumbling on since 2013 when hundreds of locals in  wetsuits protested in the Giudecca Canal with the sole aim to disrupt the passage of cruise ships and earlier this month 500 locals took to the streets with shopping trolleys and pushchairs in a protest that was aimed at highlighting the negative effect mass tourism is having on the city and to raise awareness about the effects of mass tourism on the city with posters around Venice reading “Tourists Go Away!!! You Are Destroying This Area.” 

Venetians fear that the influx of visitors is damaging the local environment, spoiling the character of Venice and pricing locals out of the city making property too expensive for them to remain there but is this shortsighted of the local people? Surely the revenue that is brought in from cruise passengers and other tourists is needed for the City to survive?

It is true that the number of visitors each day – 60,000 – now exceeds the number of Venetians and not all are well behaved – in August this year the mayor of Venice threatened badly behaved visitors with a night in prison after a drunken tourist jumped off the city’s famed Rialto Bridge and smashed into a passing water taxi.

The United Nations has warned that Venice will be placed on Unesco’s list of endangered heritage sites if Italy fails to ban giant cruise ships from the city’s lagoon by 2017

This question is at the center of the current debate between environmentalists and the tourism industry in Venice, it has been raging for years as concerned locals and organizations  strive to protect the city for future generations.

So what is the solution? Cruise passengers want to visit Venice and the ships are getting bigger and many have Venice as their home port, around 22 million tourists visit Venice each year apparently annoying the locals by ”crowding narrow alleyways, barging onto water buses with backpacks and wandering around during the summer in bikini tops and shorts” – a huge dilemma faced by most of the world’s beautiful old cities since cheap travel has created massive and invasive tourism but can Venice really survive without this?

Maybe the solution is to create an offshore platform for cruise ships to dock so that they would moor far outside of Venice ?

What are your thoughts? Should it be about Euros or Environment and Culture…????