SANTORINI STAMPEDE as 11,000 Cruisers Flood Island in a Single Day
Is this what the curse of Barcelona-style tourist overload looks like?
There’s something about Santorini — beautiful, interesting, island-like (well, it’s an island after all, but way more island-like than, say, Staten Island, ya know?) and, to judge by recent reports, swamped with cruise ship tourists who are descending on the wisp of volcanic rock in the Aegean Sea like so many selfie-snapping locusts.
How bad it is getting? Pretty bad. Last Tuesday, 11,000 cruise ship passengers swarmed the island on a single day — how’s that for Mediterranean enchantment?
Greek newspaper Kathimerini reported that “a social media post by Panagiotis Kavallaris, president of the Thira municipal community, which was later deleted, urged residents to limit their movements due to the surge in tourist traffic.”
Santorini’s mayor told the paper that the number of cruise passengers disembarking on the island should not exceed 8,000 per day and that “Starting in 2025, we will reinstate this cap to preserve our island as a unique destination.”
That’s nice. But the problem really starts at the source, and that’s us — as in, the United States. We are living in a country where corporate lobbyists have essentially hijacked any meaningful form of government regulation of a cruise ship industry that has gone off the rails, building bigger and bigger monster ships and relentlessly marketing European cruises with what amounts to false advertising, on a level of how big tobacco used to market cigarettes as wonder sticks to kids.
Aside from the obvious culprits like Royal Caribbean, Carnival Cruises, Disney etc — basically any company with headquarters in Florida, the Venezuela/Dubai of America — there are others like Seattle-based Costco, which engages in deceptive travel marketing practices every day. We won’t go so far as to say fraudulent, but when the marketing material positions a given destination, be it Santorini or Kauai, as a kind of magical unspoiled paradise, well, that’s not what the product really delivers, is it?
This is happening as local island sources tell Greek Column that the crowds of cruise ship passengers have made once pleasant spots like Oia, famous for its sunset views, unbearable in summer which, of course, goes for most of September too.
We have observed packs of wild Americans roaming the streets of once-obscure Athenian neighborhoods, struggling to find their second-rate Airbnbs (another toxic company) in areas never slated for tourists, brandishing cheap beach bags and baseball caps that scream “Santorini” as if they’ve just come back from Disneyland.
One thing the locals will never tell you is to cross Santorini off your list — the Greeks are still rightly proud of their geography and heritage, while the Spanish are taking their anger out on tourists (but what can you expect from a country that thinks it’s noble to dress men like Liberace and have them harpoon innocent bulls?) However, given this state of affairs, just as we would advise avoiding Venice or Barcelona until October or November, we must now say the same for Santorini.
Parts of Santorini are probably headed toward the sort of sleek commodification we are now seeing in Italy’s fabled but overrated Cinque Terra. Insert shrug emoji here.
