Students Put the Brake on Accelerating Tourism in the Greek Islands

For years now, University of Cincinnati teams have visited municipalities in Greece to provide on-the-spot aid to overwhelmed locales caught in tourism’s rising tide.  Led by Michael Romanos, professor of planning in UC’s prestigious College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning, this year’s team of 11 students and seven faculty members (from UC and elsewhere) is again at work on the Greek island of Santorini.

Santorini, an eight-mile-long island north of Crete, receives an astonishing

three million

visitors per year.  The carrying capacity of the island is just too small for so many.  And that’s why the UC team is on site there for the second year in a row, to help the islanders bail themselves out.

While there the UC students will be sending back updates on their work and experiences.  Below is the first e-mail report from student Allison Maume:

An Amazing Day at the Port of Athinois
Well, all I can say is that I could be at home in Cincinnati doing something non-productive like shopping or laying out on my back deck getting a tan, but this isn’t how this particular summer day was spent.  Instead, I was at the port of Athinios in Santorini, Greece!  I was there to study the cruise-ship patterns throughout the day and watch the tourists, busses, cars and taxis all go crazy trying to leave the port at once.  There’s something about saying that I’m doing homework in Greece that just has an awesome ring to it.  I’m here on this trip working to make the island a better place… How much better could it get? 

Another student, Zach Duvall, and I drove down the steep and windy road leading to the port, got there bright and early at 7:30 a.m. and arrived just in time to see the first cruiser drift in. 

The port of Athinios is located within the caldera (the remains of a ruptured volcano) which makes the port even more interesting because we were basically inside a sunken volcano.  How many people can say that they’ve been inside a volcano?  You can imagine how amazed the tourists are to be arriving in Santorini seeing this enormous rock formation in front of them. 

When we got there, we observed that the cruise ship never pulled up close to the dock.  There were about five smaller boats called tenders that scurried out to the cruiser to unload its passengers.  This took an hour and a half!  The tenders took turns unloading passengers and the people all had their colorful numbered patches pinned to their shirts coordinating them with the tour bus they were supposed to get on.  The busses were all lined up along the dock just waiting for its tourists.  Surprisingly, the busses took off like they were in some sort of race.  There was almost no delay.  Keep in mind this was about 9 in the morning and there was only one boat unloading.

Later however, busses, taxis and cars poured into the small port all lining up, well more like piling in anywhere to wait for the next cruise ship of tourists.  There were people with their hotel signs anxiously waiting to advertise and persuade some new guests and the small parking lot progressed into a maze of cars.  Then we saw a cruise ship and a ferry pulling in.  The ferry was actually small enough to dock at the port, while again the tenders were making their usual laps.  People unloaded.  Oil trucks were unloaded, motorcycles, cars!  It was a free-for-all!  And it was very unsafe for people walking around.  There was no organization, no regulation, nothing.  Cars and busses were honking at each other as they tried to squeeze their way out of the parking lot onto the narrow road to head up the volcano.  This was supposed to be the great experience of coming to Santorini for the first time, but it was more like fighting for your life to not get hit by an oil truck!

For more background on UC’s work in Santorini, go to http://www.uc.edu/news/NR.asp?id=2724