In Manarola, the smallest of the five picturesque villages that make up Italy’s Cinque Terre, the confused crowd piled up from the train to the platform was struggling with suitcases and backpacks, barely able to move. But still the cheerful Italian butler, who was leading them single file towards the narrow exit of the station, was telling them to hurry.
“Quick… Manarola needs more tourists!” he said in English. Barely noticing his irony, visitors picked up the pace of their shuffles before dispersing towards the small marina to snap an Instagram-perfect photo of the rugged Riviera coastline.
There was a time when Manarola’s year-round population, which had dwindled to about 350, could take a peaceful afternoon siesta.
“Old people like me were used to sleeping around four o’clock,” said 80-year-old Giancarlo Cielano, nostalgically recalling afternoon naps in a bygone region. “But as more people came, we couldn’t do that anymore. “There were constant noises and suitcases rolling down the streets… We couldn’t hear the sound of the sea anymore.”
From Venice and Dubrovnik to Bali and Alaska, managing mass tourism is a dilemma facing many popular global destinations. In Italy, 2023 was a record year, with foreigners making up the majority of visitors for the first time since before the coronavirus pandemic. Great for the country’s coffers, but not so good for coveted hotspots trying to strike a balance between managing huge flows with economic rewards.
Venice became the first major city in the world to impose an entrance fee in April; this was partly an emergency intervention by authorities there to prevent the Unesco heritage site from being blacklisted.
Authorities in Cinque Terre, a Unesco site whose breathtaking fishing villages sit between the Ligurian coast and rugged mountains and are connected not only by a network of hiking trails, train or sea, are working urgently to ensure this does not become a problem. a similar turning point.
Measures put to the test so far this year have included making the Sentiero Azzurro track, which runs between Monterosso al Mare and Vernazza, the most congested track in the national park, one-way on public holidays.
“It worked very well and was appreciated by our guests, especially foreigners,” said its president, Donatella Bianchi. Cinque Terre National Park, He added that the plan is to expand the initiative. Plans have also been approved to limit sea access to electric boats in a bid to protect marine life.
But Cinque Terre’s biggest problem is managing the crowds that fill its small villages. The record 4 million people who visited last year were concentrated in a 1 km area; this covered only 3% of the entire national park. The majority arrive by train, but thousands of passengers a day are dropped off by ferries carried from cruise ships docked in nearby La Spezia.
“Our problem is not overtourism, but overcrowding and at certain times of the year,” said Fabrizia Pecunia, mayor of Manarola and Riomaggiore, who has imposed limits on the number of canoes in the small bay to reduce the number of ships. fills the sea.
“The real challenge is how to distribute tourism to the region, and we need to do this quickly without giving the impression that we are anti-tourism, because for us tourism is essential.”
But there have been tensions between local authorities and regional authorities in Liguria over the much-anticipated reopening in July of the Via dell’Amore (Way of Love), the famous lower-coast hiking trail that connects Manarola to Riomaggiore and has since been closed. Landslide in 2012. Visitors will need to pay to access the 12km trail, but the price has not yet been determined and time-slotted guided tours will be available with a limited number of groups.
Pecunia fears a promotional campaign by the regional council that plays on the romantic connotations of the road will lead to an even bigger increase in the type of tourists who are there just to edit their social media profiles. The road got its name years ago after someone scrawled a message on a wall that read “naked people meet here,” but it was originally called Strada Nuova, or New Road.
“It was created around 1930 to unite two communities and has nothing to do with love,” he said. “The district came up with the idea of holding a ‘longest kiss’ contest over my corpse to mark the reopening.”
But as the road is poised to attract even more visitors, the general consensus is that the key solution to managing the crowds is to disperse them towards the mountains, where they can get to know the real Cinque Terre and the farming community that grows the vineyards. olive and fruit trees on strips of land carved into amphitheatre-like terraced cliffs. A project is underway to reclaim abandoned lands for agriculture and rebuild the park’s characteristic dry stone walls.
“Cinque Terre is more than a picture postcard,” said Marina Mangano, president of the tourism association Fondazione Manarola, which established an information center at the Riomaggiore castle to raise people’s awareness of Cinque Terre’s culture and natural environment. “Its beauty depends on those who work hard to preserve it. “Doing this means we can have tourism, because without conservation there would be no Cinque Terre.”
As part of the project, Cielano helps teach dry stone wall construction. After living near the sea for years, he went to the mountains in search of silence. “I sleep happily now,” he said. “You need to be a little patient with the tourists, but we also need them to be more aware of what Cinque Terre really is so they can have a better experience.”