Overtourism is Bad. But Tourism Helped Save Italy's Cinque Terre.
Overtourism is Bad. But Tourism Helped Save Italy's Cinque Terre.
Not everything about tourism is terrible.
Overtourism is Bad. But Tourism Helped Save Italy's Cinque Terre.
Lots of people say that overtourism has ruined Italy’s Cinque Terre — that famous chain of five charming little villages along the Italian Riviera.
And the area definitely gets a ton of tourists. We just spent the month of October exploring the Cinque Terre in what is supposed to be the shoulder season. And more than once, Brent and I looked at the crowds and said to each other, “What the hell must this place be like in July?”
By all accounts, it’s awful, especially when the cruise ships land in nearby La Spezia. The Cinque Terre now sees 2.5 million tourists a year. Disneyland, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, gets 8.5 million annual visitors, but that’s a huge amusement park, not a series of tiny villages clinging to a rocky coastline.
A lot of people complain about the crowds, saying that tourism has ruined the Cinque Terre. There’s an idea that without tourism, the Cinque Terre would be just as vibrant and beautiful, except with many fewer people.
And that’s almost certainly not true.
The truth is, before the arrival of tourism, the Cinque Terre was in pretty bad shape.
Life in this corner of the world has never been easy.
The area has been occupied since the Bronze Age, but after the fall of Rome, pirates terrorized the waters off-shore, and the locals retreated up into the rocky mountains. Thanks to those pirates, the residents didn’t even dare to harvest much seafood.
By the 10th century, the military might of nearby Genoa had begun to tame the pirates, and the people finally felt safe enough to settle down along the water’s edge. This is when the villages of the Cinque Terre first arose.
Soon, the locals had discovered viticulture — the growing of grapes — and began carefully constructing a series of rocky terraces on which they could grow this crop, despite being completely surrounded by steep hills. Eventually, they built thousands of kilometers of these terraces.
Maybe it was all that warm Mediterranean sun, but by the start of the 14th century, the region’s wines were considered some of the best in Europe.
But maintaining all those terraces wasn’t easy, nor was growing and harvesting grapes on the sides of sheer mountains. In the 19th century, when industrialization hit Italy, many locals left for better-paying, less-taxing jobs in the big cities.
By the 20th century, life in the Cinque Terre wasn’t nearly as lazy or charming as it is in the Pixar movie Luca, which is set in the 1950s in a fictional place inspired by this real-life area. According to World Monuments Fund, the local population declined rapidly, from a high of 8,000 in 1921 to less than 4,000 by the end of the century.
The fact is, modern wineries had made the cumbersome vineyards of the Cinque Terre unprofitable, and workers were tired of the physically exhausting work. Before long, most of the terraced vineyards had been abandoned, which further hurt the local economy.
Since they weren’t being maintained, the stone buttresses supporting the terraces began to collapse. The land became unstable, and landslides were common, sometimes even threatening the villages below.
In this way, the villages of the Cinque Terre were even worse off than the many remote Italian villages that have now become desperate enough to pay people to move there.
In the 70s, adventurous travelers began discovering the beauty of the Cinque Terre, and the locals began sprucing things up. It’s not true, as some have claimed, that this is when the locals first began painting their buildings the distinctive bright colors, but it is true that the locals began repainting their buildings, and rebuilt and restored many of them, specifically to appeal to these intrepid new tourists.
Suddenly, the area had a new industry, and the local economy finally began to see signs of life again.
The area went truly big-time as a tourist destination in the 90s and 00s, and it may even have been the result of a single travel writer: the uber-popular Rick Steves.
That said, the area was still rough around the edges, and those terraced vineyards were still abandoned.
Then on October 25, 2011, storms hit the area, dumping 20 inches of rain. Because so many of the terraces had lost their integrity, the landslides and flash flooding were really bad. Water and debris swept down into the villages of Monterosso and Vernazza, causing major damage and killing several people.
As a result of that disaster — and yes, all those new tourists — local groups working with the government made it a priority to restore the terraces. The grapes from this area were named a “certified product” (like champagne in the Champagne region of France) helping to make wine from this area more valuable, and also making terrace farming economically viable again.
The terraces are incredibly beautiful too, and the restored vineyards now include trails open to the public. Some even wind through the terraces themselves.
There’s no denying that tourism has made the restoration and revitalization of this whole area much more successful.
Do too many people visit the Cinque Terre these days? Probably, especially in summer. Overtourism is a bad thing, and local officials need to do a better job of managing the increasing popularity of the area.
But the issue is more complicated than many people make it sound. Sometimes the complaints about overtourism sound a lot like people just complaining that their own travels have been impacted by heavy crowds.
The fact is, tourism is often a good thing. Indeed, if not for tourism, the Cinque Terre would probably be a lot rougher, more dangerous, and less beautiful than it is now.
Michael Jensen is a novelist and editor. For more about Michael, visit him at MichaelJensen.com.
So glad that you two got to experience the beauty and majesty of this amazing location outside of the busy tourist season! Super important to recognize both the benefits and detrimental impacts of our travels so we can be intentional about contributing greater benefits into a location while simultaneously being mindful of minimizing the negative possible implications of our presence in a place.
What a great way to present the complexity of this. Thank you. (Also, it reminds me of something we said a lot in walkability and public transit circles: You aren't *in* traffic; you *are* traffic.)