Tourism: Elbow-to-Elbow at the Louvre

By Marguerite Johnson

Costantino Federico, the mayor of Capri, has had enough. The hordes of tourists who inundate the Mediterranean isle every summer will no longer be permitted to lounge around the famed piazzetta. Nor can they camp outdoors in sleeping bags, walk around in noisy wooden sandals or loiter bare-torsoed in public places. Farther north, on the island of Ponza, a favorite vacation spot for Romans, officials have banned automobiles until the end of August. The last straw, say residents, was the hundreds of cars that rolled off the ferries from the mainland every day last summer, choking the narrow roads and causing loathsome pollution and noise.

The prehistoric Lascaux caves in France's Dordogne region were closed in 1963 because the presence of tourists was destroying the 17,000-year-old paintings on their walls. Now Lascaux II, a replica built nearby in 1983 to give visitors a sense of the Cro-Magnon artwork, has become so overcrowded that entry is limited to 2,000 a day. The great Cathedral of Notre Dame in the heart of Paris has yet to take such extreme measures, but it may soon have to: more than 11.5 million people visited the church last year to admire its Gothic architecture and rose windows.

Such throngs not only create wear and tear on the cathedral floor but, with that many people simply breathing, even raise the humidity to damaging levels. "I've actually seen rivulets of condensation running down the stained- glass windows," says Christian Dupavillon, director of patrimony for the French Ministry of Culture. Even the tourist industry is alarmed. "Will we have to create a Notre Dame II similar to the replica they were forced to build at Lascaux?" asked the trade daily Le Quotidien de Tourisme in an editorial.

Britain's most hallowed sites are having similar problems. The dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London announced that visitors will have to pay a $3.25 entrance fee, after the church had to spend $150,000 to repair its rare black- and-gold marble floor. The surface had been damaged by salt and grit tracked in by tourists wearing sneakers. And forget about stopping at Westminster Abbey, even on a Sunday morning, for a few quiet moments of prayer. "Now it's like Harrods three days before Christmas," says cultural historian John Julius Norwich. "Salisbury Cathedral is just as bad. The whole atmosphere is gone. You can't see anything, and people are talking in 20 different languages."

From the cobblestoned streets of Bath, where angry Britons turned hoses on tour buses grinding through their neighborhoods last summer, to the sinking shores of Venice, where visitors on a summer Sunday often number 100,000, overcrowding, pollution and plain incivility have become unwelcome guests. Europeans in particular are realizing that tourism has got out of hand. This year alone more than 400 million people around the globe will travel abroad. By the year 2000, the number will be 650 million. And those figures do not include the millions who go sight-seeing in their own countries.

In times past, putting up with litter, noxious fumes and bad manners seemed an acceptable price to pay for the revenue tourism brought in and the jobs it created. A big business it is too. In Britain the tourist industry contributed $39 billion to the economy last year. Italy took in $21 billion. France, the world's second most favored destination after the U.S., collected $17.7 billion from tourism, more than it earned from agriculture or arms. For poorer countries like Greece, tourism is the main source of foreign exchange, so a drop in the number of visitors, which is feared this year because of the gulf war and the crisis in neighboring Yugoslavia, is economically painful.

But increasingly, ordinary citizens as well as public officials and cultural guardians are beginning to believe that the costs may outweigh the benefits. Jobs generated by tourism in hotels, restaurants and parks, while in demand among local people, are usually at the low end of the pay scale. The biggest beneficiaries of tourist spending are developers and owners, who often take their profits out of town and, if they are foreigners, out of the country as well. Even the tourist industry is starting to recognize that threatened treasures must be protected or business will not survive. As London's Daily Telegraph put it in an editorial, "Unless tourism is brought under firmer discipline, it will destroy itself. We think we are within measurable distance of killing the goose which lays the golden eggs."

In point of fact, monuments and scenic spots all over Britain are under virtual siege, with 18 million visitors pouring in every year. In the Lake District the National Trust has spent more than $2 million repairing erosion of public footpaths. Residents of Bath have trouble reaching their shops on summer Saturdays because of tourists descending on the town to see the Royal Crescent and the Roman baths. In North Devon 370,000 visitors a year overwhelm the picturesque harbor of Clovelly (pop. 400). Sometimes they even wander into private homes.

The story is much the same elsewhere in Europe. Alpine forests in Austria and Switzerland have been denuded to make way for ski runs and cable cars. For the Conservatoire du Littoral, the French agency charged with preserving the Mediterranean coastline, the grossly overdeveloped French Riviera is the sorriest example of tourism gone awry. Not only has the coastline been ravaged by urbanization and the sea severely polluted, but tourism was down 30% last year from 1989. Pollution and overcrowding also figured in a similar drop in tourist revenues in Spain.

Greece took steps years ago to halt further deterioration of its antiquities. Planes are barred from flying over Athens, and tourists are no longer permitted to walk into the Parthenon, Athena's exquisite temple atop the Acropolis. Still, with as many as 6,000 visitors a day clambering up the Acropolis, some parts of its rock have become so slippery and dangerous that officials have had to cover them with concrete. Marble treasures in the museum have been blackened by tourists' greasy hands. Officialdom can also be difficult: although buses have not been allowed on the Acropolis since the mid-1970s, it took until this year to persuade the mayor that it was just as bad to let them park at the foot of the hill, since many drivers leave their motors running to keep the air conditioning going.

Conservationists and local residents have managed to stop some developments. Last summer scores of people took to France's Gardon River in canoes to protest a government project that would have brought motorized trains, parking lots, a museum and even a shopping arcade close to the historic Pont du Gard, a 2,000-year-old Roman aqueduct near Remoulins. The Pont already draws more than 2 million visitors a year. Historians, environmentalists and locals also joined forces against a commercial project planned for Chambord, one of the most illustrious of the Loire Valley chateaus. The castle was scheduled to become the site of a "Renaissance" theme park, with two hotels, shops, an artificial lake and a tower with a revolving restaurant at the top.

The solutions, like the problems, are rarely simple. At Stonehenge, the , English Heritage, a commission created to help preserve ancient monuments, is seeking to close a public highway to reduce pollution and enhance the site. But residents are up in arms because the closure will force them out of their way to shop. "There is a thing worth preserving as much as Stonehenge -- and that is community life," says Amy Hall, a resident. "If we lived in the South American jungle, you'd be saying, 'Save the natives.' We're the natives here." The Rev. Robert Runcie, retired Archbishop of Canterbury, goes even further, charging that tourism "creates pollution, prostitution, economic exploitation and disregard for indigenous life-styles."

Something has indeed been lost. Only 10 years ago, travelers in Greece or Turkey would have been invited into peasant homes, offered an ouzo or a handful of ripe plums. Even in remote villages now, such hospitality -- the essence of what travel to another culture is about -- is pretty much a thing of the past. Says historian Norwich: "Tourism brutalizes. Self-respect gives way to servility, good manners to surliness, and hospitality to cupidity and suspicion." To try to educate tourists to be more sensitive travelers, the World Wildlife Fund has put out a series of booklets on ways to avoid abusing the environment.

For those who feel guilty about lying on a Mediterranean beach, there are other things to do. The British travel firm of Eco Holidays, for example, is offering a trip to assist in woodland preservation in Romania. But John Button, author of The Green Guide to England, may have the ultimate solution. The "truly aware," says he, will not go on holiday at all.

With reporting by Anne Constable/London, Leonora Dodsworth/Rome and Victoria Foote-Greenwell/Paris