Venice has had enough: Local elections will decide the city’s direction on tourism
https://english.elpais.com/international/2026-05-25/venice-has-had-enough-local-elections-will-decide-the-citys-direction-on-tourism.html
Posted by Logibenq
Venice has had enough: Local elections will decide the city’s direction on tourism
https://english.elpais.com/international/2026-05-25/venice-has-had-enough-local-elections-will-decide-the-citys-direction-on-tourism.html
Posted by Logibenq
28 Comments
Relying on tourism as an economic motor is one of the biggest reasons of Europe’s decline.
Expensive Visas for non-EU citizens should be required, specially for Russian oligarchs
Cruise travels should be banned
Surely the easy option is to just ban cruise ships
A massive eyesore
The people on them contribute the bare minimum to the economy since they’re dining onboard for breakfast and dinner and sleeping on broad
Horrible to the environment
Ban them.
A world wide ban on cruise ships needs to happen. They literally serve no purpose other than floating pollution machines.
Tourism has become a plague to society: Offering bullshit jobs, creating environmental pollution on high levels, creating housing shortage and affordability issues, very few people really benefit from this and those are not properly taxed.
Never went to venice but i’m in total favor that locals should decide how little tourists They want. Raise the prices, people will still pay
Yeah, I bet they will let bezos only rent their city once or twice more but that’s enough.
It’s too late, but I hope they can still fix it. It have become Disneyland. I am very worried for my city of Paris : touristy neighborhood, rise of rent, gentrification and entin area with only tourists. How to call a city.
What other economic sector does Venice have?
Tourism is literally all they have, Venice is a museum city.
I’d love to visit Venice, but I’m put off by articles like this. If I’m not welcome that’s really sad but I accept it.
I do worry that if the locals get what they wish what’ll happen to their economy, will Venice thrive if no one visits? What is the demographic of people against tourism? Do they work in the industry?
Venice in the evening is lovely. They need to manage the daytrippers.
It’s ok, it will all be underwater in a generation anyway.
Ok here is the solution to over tourism:
A higher sales tax / vat tax.
Then once a year cut a check to the residents so the residents are not paying the tax and actually benefiting from it.
Yea if food costs $50 more at a restaurant I probably wont come back and if I do come back locals will smile because they get paid every time i eat.
Do local authorities not have the power to do this?
A lot of tourist destinations are moving towards wanting fewer, higher-paying visitors. It’s the package tours and discount tourists looking for a cheap break that they don’t want.
Protect venice at all cost.
The article is quite balanced and seems like no candidate wants to ban tourism.
The reality is that native population is aging and dying out slowly, or moving away.
The €10 eur daily entry fee didn’t fix anything either.
And:
“School enrollment figures have just come out: there are 2,062 fewer registrations across all grades. In some preschools, there are eight children. The city’s average age is 58.”
Population for Venice inner city is 47k.
It seems in southern Europe, they’ve chosen tourists as their scapegoat rather than immigrants. What a refreshing change!
Need to visit Venice as soon as possible
Good. I’ve been twice, once with school and again as an adult, and it was unenjoyable the first time and has got worse. I often talk about how much I hated it last time… Coming back from Slovenia, it was not a nice contrast. Absolutely swimming through crowds… and I don’t think I met an Italian the whole trip.
At least with other very beautiful places in the med (e.g. Rome, Florence, Barcelona, Madrid, Seville) you can still see someone on their way to work and their job is not in the tourist industry.
It’s just become Epcot but with no entry limit and smelly, inconvenient canals. It’s not like you can enjoy the history at the moment, nor experience the city as a place with its own culture.
Europe killing its own economy as it ages with no backup plan while the United States and China duke it out for global high tech dominance
In 15 years this place will be the IMF’s dream, cutting social safety nets to the bone and having an absolute feast of deregulation
Venice is such a dirty smelly place anyway with barely any public toilets
As I posted in another topic about Spain last week.
This is an easy issue to solve without harming your tourism economy.
Ban cruise ships. Cruise ship passengers aren’t beneficial to your local tourism economy, they eat on board the ship so your entire hospitality sector does not benefit, and they sleep on board so your hotels don’t benefit. But the cruise ship tourists do contribute to the strain on your services, on crowding the streets etc.
Simply ban them. Or put a huge disembark tax on each passenger that the cruise ship has to pay, like €100+ per passenger. And get money from them that way.
The other simple step, is to stop airBNBs. They hollow out the communities and do the most harm to locals who get priced out and pushed out of their own communities for the benefit of tourists.
The UK has trialed measures to tackle this. Wales has increased council tax on second homes used for short term lets by upto 300%. Which changes the affordability calculation of owning these properties as part of an income making portfolio. Because the tax pushes the price they have to charge customers up enough that people stop booking them and go to hotels instead. So it’s a subtle way to push the airBNB market out and kill it.
Other parts of the UK have started copying it, Cornwall for example. And in all the places that do it, they see actual results of airBNBs closing and being put in the market and people moving back in.
These two very small steps would be enough to solve much of the issues tourism causes, without damaging the tourist economy too much.
“It now protects the city from *acqua alta*, but it will be insufficient in a few decades — and for now, it is not a political priority. The candidates also differ on whether they believe in climate change and think action is needed immediately, or deny it altogether.”
I guess they will soon find out.. the city is literally sinking and they are debating whether that’s real or not, even though already today it’s only protected by an artificial structure.
This is tough. I was originally going to comment on closing off access to “the everyman” tourist, a city dependent on tourists, and therefore tipping ever more into the hands of the wealthy. But it seems more that Venetians want to find a balance, still share their city with the world, but that can’t be done if there’s no city–and no inhabitants. Tough.
Just implement a daily entrance fee of 200€ for tourists and distribute the proceeds equally among all residents. This will significantly reduce tourism while allowing Venetians to directly profit from it.
They will miss the money.
Now that its my turn to become an adult and visit these beautiful places, this shit starts to happen. Amazing lol
Umm, that’s a bit late, dontyouthink?