2 weeks Ago
Tourist arrivals will continue last year’s upward path in 2025. Cystat reported that arrivals for the first quarter of this year were up 7.5 per cent, compared to 2024, reaching 446,596.
The growth exceeded the 5 per cent for the whole of 2024, which recorded the highest ever number of arrivals. The figures for the first quarter “indicate a particularly dynamic tourist year and show that tourism is continuing from where it stopped last year”, said deputy minister for tourism Costas Koumis, commenting immediately after the release of the stats. Koumis, understandably, takes great pride in such positive news, saying “it is particularly important that our main markets continue to record a steady upward course.
” For all governments, tourism has always been about the numbers – the higher the numbers of arrivals, the stronger the claim of doing a good job – no consideration ever being given to its negative consequences, such as uncontrolled development, irreparable harm to the environment and a big strain on the island’s resources. We might not have enough water for farming and domestic needs, but we will be hosting more tourists and opening another golf course for tourists this year. Rising numbers might be good for the economy, but no government has measured the cost of this in any meaningful way.
Instead, we are served with platitudes. In the deputy ministry’s latest annual report it lists among its most important actions, “the updating of the National Tourism Strategy with the horizon of 2035, with particular emphasis now to the principles of sustainable development, the green transition, digital transformation and the further improvement of the infrastructure of accessibility.” The actions are the same as they have always been – turning the island to an “all-year sustainable destination”.
Does anyone at the deputy ministry of tourism know what ‘sustainable development’ or ‘sustainability’ means? Tourism policy has always consisted of uncontrolled development, pursuing bigger numbers and depletion of natural resources, none which falls under the category of sustainability. The word ‘sustainability’ is just another policy slogan, as meaningless as ‘quality tourism’. For decades every government would announce it would upgrade the tourism product because we had to attract ‘quality tourism.
’ The upgrade never materialised because no government would dare quit the mass tourism model that was always pursued. And now every government is sucking the sustainable tourism lollipop, without having any intention of doing anything about it. So long as the population does not protest, as people have started doing in Spain, nothing will change, because covering all the island’s natural beauty spots in concrete is what the tourism ministry and politicians consider ‘sustainable development’.
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