First came Venice’s €5 charge on day-trippers who enter the city.
Now, the Italian city will cap the size of tourist groups and ban the use of loudspeakers by tour guides to maintain Venice’s sanctity.
The new measures will take effect on Aug. 1 with the aim of “protecting the peace of residents” and making Venice’s paths more pedestrian-friendly. They will apply to Venice’s main city center as well as the islands of Murano, Burano and Torcello, and could result in fines between €25-500 if breached, Reuters reported.
The loudspeaker ban and crowd control were meant to kick in in June, just weeks after Venice became the first city to charge an entrance fee for visitors, dubbed the “tourist tax.” The goal? To rein in those making day trips to the city during peak travel season.
It’s still too early to gauge the pilot program's success, although estimates suggest the local government has already raised $2.6 million from more than 485,000 tourists.
Venetians have criticized it, saying it’s turning the city into a “theme park.” Others felt that a small sum wouldn’t do anything to deter overtourism and would be complicated to enforce.
Tourism has real ramifications in the lagoon city, as it’s on UNESCO’s list of endangered destinations.
UNESCO highlighted the environmental damage from motorboats and cruise ships approaching the city and the impact of tourism on Venice’s historic buildings, as they get flipped for commercial use, as key risks facing the city.
Roughly 20 million people visited Venice in 2023—that’s 400 times the city’s population of just under 50,000. As one of the most visited cities in Europe, Venice has somewhat drowned in a sea of tourists. But putting a lid on those numbers won’t be easy. As more people leave the city, it has come to rely on tourism to drive the economy.
Venice has become the symbol of the overtourism trend that several other European cities grapple with. The city has risked degrading the quality of life and services for the locals as they battled with a limited housing supply and essential services due to a higher inflow of visitors.
Amsterdam is looking to ban cruise ships—a measure Venice adopted in 2021—as they push to keep “nuisance” tourists away. Meanwhile, Barcelona announced that it would stop short-term rentals to free-up housing for its residents.
It’s a delicate balance between preserving some of Europe’s most frequented cities without turning tourists away completely. Whether Venice is successful in achieving that remains to be seen.
