The European Hot Spots Struggling With the Tourist Masses
Italy, Spain and Greece are on track for a record-setting tourism season, and not everyone is happy about it; ‘It’s too much’
4 min
MONTEROSSO AL MARE, Italy—A worker shouts in Italian, English and French, directing throngs of tourists through the small train station. Wild gesticulations, a fluorescent yellow vest and a booming voice help her to stand out on the packed platform.
Swarms of people holding backpacks and water bottles squeeze past each other, some heading for a departing train, others for the exit and a stunning view of the sea and cliffs that have made the villages of Italy’s Cinque Terre a global tourist draw.
Outside the station, lines form at food shops. Signs say all the umbrellas and reclining chairs are occupied at the pay-only beach on Monterosso’s waterfront. Narrow alleyways are crammed with tourists eating gelato or sipping bubble tea.
“Tourism is necessary, it’s almost all we have here, but it’s too much,” said Angela Costa, a longtime Cinque Terre resident.
Italy’s tourist season started with a record number of visitors over Easter. In the Cinque Terre, the congestion was so bad that local officials made the area’s famous hiking trails one-way on the busiest days. The situation repeated itself over several weekends in May and June.
“Easter was crazy, and now it’s ramping up again,” said David Cefaliello, who works in a cafe in Corniglia, another of the five Cinque Terre villages. “We aren’t at pre-Covid levels yet, but I suspect that will change in a few weeks.”
Millions of Europeans and Americans are engaging in so-called revenge tourism, making up for lost travel time during the pandemic-affected years of 2020-22. Millions of Chinese tourists are expected to visit Europe this summer and fall after the elimination of China’s travel restrictions.
Italy is likely to surpass the record number of tourists and overnight stays set in 2019, before Covid struck, according to market research firm Demoskopika. Arrivals in the period from June to September are expected to be 3.7% higher than the same period in 2019 and 30% more than a decade ago. Italy’s Tourism Ministry has also said it expects a record year, as have Spanish and Greek officials.
All those visitors are giving a welcome boost to Southern Europe’s economies, which depend heavily on tourism. In Italy, more than 10% of the economy is linked to travel and tourism, compared with 15% in Spain and 19% in Greece, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council. In France and the U.S., the level is around 9%.
But locals are increasingly asking how much the Cinque Terre, Barcelona and Athens can take. Discontent is also rising in some places, spurring local efforts to rein in the tourist hordes.
In Portofino, a small upscale village on the Italian Riviera popular with the international jet set, police are fining people who block foot traffic to take selfies.
In 2024, Venice plans to introduce an entry fee to the city on the busiest days of the year, according to the mayor’s office.
In Barcelona, locals hang signs saying “tourists are terrorists,” while in Athens, residents complain about how the spread of Airbnb rentals for tourists is driving up rents and displacing Greeks from the city centre.
In May, about 10,000 short-term rental properties were available in Athens, almost a quarter more than in May 2018, according to market-research firm AirDNA. Demand for short-term rentals in Greece increased 62% in May compared with the same month last year, the firm said.
The Italian Alpine region of Alto Adige has capped the number of beds available for tourists in private properties to fight the proliferation of short-term rentals.
The crowds are spreading far beyond the Mediterranean. On the coast of Normandy in northern France, authorities have turned people away from Mont Saint-Michel, the tidal island topped with an abbey. The Louvre museum in Paris has put a daily limit on the number of visitors.
The French government is planning an advertising campaign to encourage people to travel at different times of the year and to consider less-famous destinations.
The flow of tourists to France has held strong even as the country has been racked with protests, including months of demonstrations over President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to raise the age of retirement. Now the country is grappling with nightly riots following the shooting of a teenager by police.
Luxury hotels in Europe are enjoying the boom, but many are looking for new ways to keep their high-paying clients happy despite the masses of tourists.
“We are always looking for something we can offer that will avoid the crowds, like hiking trails that are less well known, a private boat trip to Capri or a wine-tasting tour,” said Pietro Monti, head of marketing at the five-star Hotel Mediterraneo near the Amalfi coast, where rooms cost an average of about $1,200 a night. “But when it’s the high season, especially a record year like this, some crowding is inevitable.”
Crowds are hard to avoid in Vernazza, the Cinque Terre village that sits just south of Monterosso. On the rocks surrounding the small port, sunbathers battle for space with children kicking a soccer ball and people jumping into the sea. The crush on the rocks grows when boats arrive from one of the nearby towns.
Juli Eger, who was sipping wine and eating focaccia on a recent morning in Monterosso, while ignoring the crowds around her, finds her own workarounds.
“We were just in Venice and if you walk around very early in the morning, you only have to share the city with people taking engagement photos,” said Eger, who is traveling with her mother, husband and teenage son. “If you make Venice your first stop you’ll be jet-lagged, so getting up at 5.30 in the morning won’t even be a problem.”
—Allison Pohle and Stacy Meichtry contributed to this article.
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4 min
It’s go time for the highest-stakes mission at NASA in more than 50 years.
On April 1, the agency is set to launch four astronauts around the moon, the deepest human spaceflight since the final Apollo lunar landing in 1972.
The launch window for Artemis II , as the mission is called, opens at 6:24 p.m. ET.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration teams have been preparing the vehicles to depart from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on the planned roughly 10-day trip. Crew members have trained for years for this moment.
Reid Wiseman, the NASA astronaut serving as mission commander, said he doesn’t fear taking the voyage. A widower, he does worry at times about what he is putting his daughters through.
“I could have a very comfortable life for them,” Wiseman said in an interview last September.
“But I’m also a human, and I see the spirit in their eyes that is burning in my soul too. And so we’ve just got to never stop going.”
Wiseman’s crewmates on Artemis II are NASA’s Victor Glover and Christina Koch, as well as Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
What are the goals for Artemis II?
The biggest one: Safely fly the crew on vehicles that have never carried astronauts before.
The towering Space Launch System rocket has the job of lofting a vehicle called Orion into space and on its way to the moon.
Orion is designed to carry the crew around the moon and back. Myriad systems on the ship—life support, communications, navigation—will be tested with the astronauts on board.
SLS and Orion don’t have much flight experience. The vehicles last flew in 2022, when the agency completed its uncrewed Artemis I mission .
How is the mission expected to unfold?
Artemis II will begin when SLS takes off from a launchpad in Florida with Orion stacked on top of it.
The so-called upper stage of SLS will later separate from the main part of the rocket with Orion attached, and use its engine to set up the latter vehicle for a push to the moon.
After Orion separates from the upper stage, it will conduct what is called a translunar injection—the engine firing that commits Orion to soaring out to the moon. It will fly to the moon over the course of a few days and travel around its far side.
Orion will face a tough return home after speeding through space. As it hits Earth’s atmosphere, Orion will be flying at 25,000 miles an hour and face temperatures of 5,000 degrees as it slows down. The capsule is designed to land under parachutes in the Pacific Ocean, not far from San Diego.
Is it possible Artemis II will be delayed?
Yes.
For safety reasons, the agency won’t launch if certain tough weather conditions roll through the Cape Canaveral, Fla., area. Delays caused by technical problems are possible, too. NASA has other dates identified for the mission if it doesn’t begin April 1.
Who are the astronauts flying on Artemis II?
The crew will be led by Wiseman, a retired Navy pilot who completed military deployments before joining NASA’s astronaut corps. He traveled to the International Space Station in 2014.
Two other astronauts will represent NASA during the mission: Glover, an experienced Navy pilot, and Koch, who began her career as an electrical engineer for the agency and once spent a year at a research station in the South Pole. Both have traveled to the space station before.
Hansen is a military pilot who joined Canada’s astronaut corps in 2009. He will be making his first trip to space.
Koch’s participation in Artemis II will mark the first time a woman has flown beyond orbits near Earth. Glover and Hansen will be the first African-American and non-American astronauts, respectively, to do the same.
What will the astronauts do during the flight?
The astronauts will evaluate how Orion flies, practice emergency procedures and capture images of the far side of the moon for scientific and exploration purposes (they may become the first humans to see parts of the far side of the lunar surface). Health-tracking projects of the astronauts are designed to inform future missions.
Those efforts will play out in Orion’s crew module, which has about two minivans worth of living area.
On board, the astronauts will spend about 30 minutes a day exercising, using a device that allows them to do dead lifts, rowing and more. Sleep will come in eight-hour stretches in hammocks.
There is a custom-made warmer for meals, with beef brisket and veggie quiche on the menu.
Each astronaut is permitted two flavored beverages a day, including coffee. The crew will hold one hourlong shared meal each day.
The Universal Waste Management System—that’s the toilet—uses air flow to pull fluid and solid waste away into containers.
What happens after Artemis II?
Assuming it goes well, NASA will march on to Artemis III, scheduled for next year. During that operation, NASA plans to launch Orion with crew members on board and have the ship practice docking with lunar-lander vehicles that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have been developing. The rendezvous operations will occur relatively close to Earth.
NASA hopes that its contractors and the agency itself are ready to attempt one or more lunar landing missions in 2028. Many current and former spaceflight officials are skeptical that timeline is feasible.
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