I am currently on holiday in the UK, having recently enjoyed a month-long tour of Europe with my wife Alicia and 19-year-old son Calixto.
One thing we noticed, not only in highly touristy areas like Venice and Florence, but even in cities like Dusseldorf, is the introduction of a tourist tax.
We’ve also seen demonstrations against mass tourism in the news, from light-hearted water pistol attacks on foreign visitors in Barcelona to more serious protest marches in Majorca.
Last week, travel specialist Fodor’s even produced a guide to dealing with tourism protests.
The key factor sparking the protests seems to be the impact of mass tourism, not tourism per se, and particularly the effect it has on house availability and prices.
The tax we paid to visit Venice, the most touristy place on our itinerary, was a token one euro per person and only on certain days of the week; though the owner of our hotel grumbled about it (in a typically Italian way, mainly because of suspicion over where the money went), it seemed pretty reasonable to me: anyone who can afford to pay for a hotel and meal in this unique city can certainly afford it!
In Florence and Dusseldorf it was also a payment of a few euros per person per day added to the hotel bill.
Meanwhile, in Argentina, the local council in the Salta hill town of Iruya, one of the best place to spot condors, and celebrated for its stunning star-studded night skies, has also introduced a tourist tax.
Touted as an eco tasa (“eco tax”), this proposed a levy on all tourists visiting the town: the price of a litre of premium fuel or four litres for foreigners. That’s around a dollar or four dollars on the blue rate. On top of that was a parking charge of 500 pesos (50 cents per hour).
Aside from the unpleasant whiff of discrimination in having different prices for local and foreign visitors, this would have affected tour agencies as well as individual visitors in hire cars: Iruya is the starting point for some of our mountain hiking tours, so our 4×4 may be parked in the town for 48 hours.
Featured in last year’s Conde Nast Traveler list of the 50 Most Beautiful Small Towns in the World, Iruya has never been a victim of mass tourism because it’s so hard to get to.
But Peronist Mayor Eugenio Herrera, elected in 2019, and re-elected last year, probably thought it was good populist move to scapegoat tourists for all the town’s ills.
The Mayor may have been inspired by Bariloche in Patagonia, which is much more easily accessible (notwithstanding long traffic jams), and very touristy, as I can testify from our first visit there in February this year.
It’s on the banks of Nahuel Huapi and the beautiful setting attracts tourism in a way that Iruya, purely because of the difficulty of access, never will.
As Conde Nast itself points out “this tiny village is only accessible via a very dusty 4-hour bus ride from the neighboring region of Jujuy”: this is part of its charm, as will be vouched for by many visitors on our escorted tours.
The tax in Bariloche has now been declared unconstitutional by Argentina’s Supreme Court, and there was rapid pushback to the proposal by Iruya’s Mayor.
Nadia Loza, secretary of Iruya Chamber of Tourism, said: “We don’t think this is the right moment to introduce a measure like this, bearing in mind the state of the country’s economy; the average Argentine is looking after the money in their pocket, and, logically, tourism may not necessarily be their priority.”
And Juan Lucero, head of Salta province Chamber of Tourism, commented: “It’s difficult enough to persuade tourists to come and visit us, and if on top of everything we are going to charge something which has been decided unilaterally by the Mayor, without even speaking to the private sector, in the current economic context, it’s very difficult.”
Salta’s tourism chief met with Iruya’s Mayor (a member of the same political party), and seems to have persuaded him to withdraw the proposal, though keeping the car park charge.
As so often in Argentina, we copy the first world, and put our foot in it. Witness the cycle path in Salta city, which has been crowbarred into a narrow lane on several roads which don’t have the space for it: and the traffic calming bollards which seem to cause more chaos than they prevent.
As one of our guides said to me recently: “We’re a long way from being in the first world, a long way.”
Just a storm in a maté cup this time, perhaps: but the issue of how tourism affects smaller communities, and how we can prevent the mass influx of visitors destroying the very charm that attracts people to beautiful locations is an elephant in the room that is not going to go away.
At the risk of sounding like a sanctimonious prig, we will continue to play our part in minimising the impact on small communities simply by doing what we do: operating private tours on a small-scale, and involving the locals as much as possible.
Even the Mayor of Iruya, whose restaurant I have eaten in many a time!
