The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
“Sometimes to enter the old part of town, you need to queue for an hour in 40-degree (104 degrees Fahrenheit) heat,” says 27-year-old Ana Belosevic, who works in the hotel business.
Mayor Mato Frankovic told AFP that cameras have been set up to monitor the number of people entering the old town and authorities plan to reduce the number of cruiseships coming into the port.
Similar measures have also been taken on the other side of the Adriatic Sea in Venice, which counts 265,000 inhabitants for around 24 million visitors annually.
Authorities there have decided to trial a system that forces visitors to make a reservation if they want to go to the popular Saint Mark’s Square during peak hours.
Tourists will also be fined 500 euros ($585) if they have picnics or bathe in the canals.
In Florence, meanwhile, authorities have started hosing down public spots such as church steps where many visitors congregate to eat picnics, to stop them from sitting down.
– Turkey tourism drop –
One of the solutions to overcrowding is to encourage visitors to go to less visited districts, thus easing up city centres, says Rafat Ali, founder of the Skift travel information website.
But this has merely expanded the problem to districts that were once tourist-free.
In Lisbon, the boom in visitors has had a significant impact on residents in its oldest district, Alfama, which is now full of tourism flats that raise property prices.
“Now in Alfama it’s difficult to find places to rent for less than 1,000 euros a month, a huge amount if you take into account the salary of a Portuguese person, which is normally lower than that,” says Maria de Lurdes Pinheiro, head of a local heritage association.
Even further north in Scotland’s remote Isle of Skye, the wild landscape is attracting an increasing number of visitors.
So much so that residents have started complaining about the number of tourists on the island’s few roads, environmental damage and a lack of accommodation.
Rifai warns though against saying no to tourism.
“The same people that today are saying we don’t want any more tourism are going to be the first ones to cry out when we lose them,” he said this week.
Turkey is a prime example.
There, authorities are desperate to boost a sector key to the economy that slumped due to a failed coup d’etat and attacks in 2016, when tourism revenue fell almost 30 percent.
“Too much tourism is a good problem to have,” says Rafat Ali.
“The worst is if nobody comes.”
