3.4 million visitors descend on Santorini a year, far outnumbering the island’s approximately 20,000 permanent residents. Dubbed “Instagram island”, as many as 17,000 cruise ship passengers descend on the island – particularly the capital Fira and Oia, on peak days during the high season, to catch a glimpse of its iconic sunsets.
By day, the cobbled streets and cliffside balconies are packed with tourists.
However, according to one local, by evening, the island goes from being as busy as Times Square in New York City to a ghost town.
“Over-tourism doesn’t exist. What I see is a lack of structures,” Gianluca Chimenti, a local tour operator and a Santorini resident for 18 years, tells CNN Travel. He insists that while social media is currently flooded with images of severe overcrowding in the island’s hotspots, the picture the rest of the time is “completely different from what is the reality”.
“The truth is that the island is empty. Right now is like never before, it’s the worst season ever.”
Town centres are dead by 9pm and the restaurants and hotels are nowhere near capacity, as the majority of tourists are day trippers from cruise ships and ferries, which only stay for a couple of hours.
Nevertheless, cruise ship passengers remain a valued and much needed part of Santorini’s economy, just like those who stay for more than a day, but Chimenti admits that the feeling among locals is that something has to give.
Santorini was not built for such levels of tourism. In the 20th-century, the island remained largely undiscovered, with sprawling vineyards for wine. Today, however, the island’s wine industry is being severely hampered with over-tourism leading to a spike in the prices of agricultural land and developers continuing to buy up such land to build holiday homes.
The outdated infrastructure, including the main port of Fira, are under severe pressure. Currently, the cable car is the only option for those passengers who don’t want to, or cannot, take the long steep walk to get to the city centre.
“It’s absolutely normal that you’re going to have a line if the cruise ships are coming all together,” Chimenti said.
However, when the crowds have gone, “the hotels right now are more or less under 30 percent of a normal season,” he claims, adding that other businesses on the island are taking a similar hit.
On August 1, Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) announced it had met with the Greek minister of maritime affairs, Christos Stylianides to discuss the crisis and improvements and upgrades to the port’s infrastructure and services.
In a statement, Maria Deligianni, CLIA’s regional director for the Eastern Mediterranean said that the growth in tourism in Greece had garnered “significant attention”, particularly concerning Santorini and Mykonos. She confirmed its cruise lines’ commitment to upholding Santorini’s 8,000-passenger cap and added that there was strong interest in diversifying Greek itineraries to disperse some of the pressure on the country’s most popular spots.
According to the CLIA, two thirds of cruise tourism in Greece is currently concentrated in Piraeus, Santorini and Mykonos, despite there being 6,000 islands and islets to explore, 227 of which are inhabited.
Chimenti questioned this fact: “Why are cruise ships not organising tours to the archaeological sites? If you split the people in three parts of the island, so at different times they are doing multiple things,” then he says, “they have time to enjoy and you will never have crowds in any part of the island.”
