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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/09/acropolis-greek-tourists-cruise-ships-athens-controls>
"It’s official: more than 25 centuries after it was built and nearly 200 years
after it began attracting tourists, the Acropolis will adopt crowd control
policies to ease the very modern plague of soaring visitor numbers.
Unprecedented queues at the foot of the site, a dramatic rise in sightseers
since the Covid-19 pandemic and unruly scenes at the gateway to the sanctuary
have spurred the Greek government to take action.
“Measures will be fully enforced by the end of the month,” the country’s
cultural minister, Lina Mendoni, announced last week. “Visits in June and early
July alone increased by 80% compared to 2019.”
A time-slot system, fast-lane entry points for organised tourist groups and
electronic ticketing are among the steps officials say will help alleviate
visitor congestion.
As the country’s most visited site, the Acropolis is said to draw more than
17,000 people daily – a reflection of the over-tourism that has affected Greece
in recent years.
Once implemented it is hoped the policies will ease the problem of queues
exacerbated by the arrival of gargantuan cruise ships decanting thousands of
passengers at the Greek capital’s port of Piraeus. “In the past these cruise
ships had the capacity to carry a few thousand, the population of a large
village,” said Lysandros Tsilidis, president of the Federation of Hellenic
Associations of Tourist and Travel Agencies, which has welcomed the measures.
“Now the vessels are so big you’ve got the size of a small state on board and
at least 30% of all of those passengers will have pre-purchased tickets to
visit the Acropolis.”
At 72, Tsilidis has seen Greece transformed from a popular, if less well-known,
Mediterranean destination in the 1970s to one of the planet’s three most
visited countries in 2022.
“No one could possibly have imagined it,” he says. “Back then, Greece attracted
7 million tourists; now that number is more than 30 million, three times our
population.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
