Santorini's overtourism brunt almost forced residents to be in a "lockdown"

The number of cruise ships docking at this prime Mediterranean destination will be curbed next year

On Tuesday, the island of Santorini lived a small crisis of sorts and this one had nothing to do with the wildfires or the heatwave gripping Greece at the moment. 11,000 cruise passengers arrived that day and this proved a bit too much to handle for the island’s infrastructure. So much so that one government official even posted an appeal to residents to restrict their movements out and about that day.

The post was quickly deleted but not before it managed to generate quite the controversy on the island and beyond in Greek media outlets with outrage at the notion that native island residents should suffer something like a “lockdown” just so that tourists could freely move about undisturbed.

This adds just another chapter to the ever-increasing conflict brewing between native residents and tourist crowds in popular European destinations, especially those in the Mediterranean Basin.

Management of tourism, more challenges than solutions

For an island that hosts 15,500 permanent residents receiving 11,000 new tourists in just one day (not counting the ones who were already in Santorini), it’s easy to see how the infrastructure can easily get overburdened, and the quality of life decreases for everyone involved.

Yet, this summer not much can be done about this problem since cruise ship dockings had already been pre-planned well in advance. The municipal authority of the island, however, claimed that it’s managed to shrink the number of such peak arrival days from 63 to 48 this year.

Santorini Mayor Nikos Zorzos told Kathimerini that the number of cruise passengers disembarking on the island should not exceed 8,000 per day.

He promised that he intends to reinstate a previous limit on this starting next year, with the goal of “preserving the island as a unique destination”.