Tourists on cruise ships face €20 fee to visit Mykonos and Santorini
Tourists arriving on cruise ships at the Greek islands of Mykonos and Santorini will have to pay €20 (£17), the Greek Prime Minister has said amid a surge in visitor numbers.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis said cruise ship visitors to the popular holiday islands in the Aegean Sea would have to pay the levy during the peak summer season, as part of efforts to clamp down on overtourism that locals say is ruining the islands.
At a press conference outlining his economic policies for 2025, Mr Mitsotakis said the cruise ship industry had put pressure on both islands.
“Cruise shipping has burdened Santorini and Mykonos and this is why we are proceeding with interventions,” he said. The fee will be €20, he added. Part of the revenues from the tax would be returned to local communities to be invested in infrastructure.
Amid a raft of plans to tackle overtourism, he added that Greece was considering a tax on short-term rentals and a ban new licences for such rentals in central Athens to increase the housing stock for residents.
There are also plans to regulate the number of cruise ships arriving simultaneously at certain destinations, and rules to protect the environment and tackle water shortages on islands, he said.
Last year 800 cruise ships brought some 1.3 million passengers to Santorini, according to the Hellenic Ports Association. About 750 cruise ships visited Mykonos, an increase of 23 per cent from the year before.
Santorini, an island of around 16,000 residents famous for its quaint villages, pristine beaches and Instagrammable sunsets, has been struggling with the tourist influx in the summer months, with long queues to popular viewing spots and crowds clogging its narrow streets.
Local officials have already set an overall limit of 8,000 cruise passengers per day from next year for Santorini.
Nikos Zorzos, the mayor of Santorini, called last month for urgent action to clamp down on a construction spree that risks ruining the island. “We live in a place of barely 25,000 souls and we don’t need any more hotels or any more rented rooms,” he said. “If you destroy the landscape, one as rich as ours, you destroy the very reason people come here in the first place.”
Greece’s Tourism Minister, Olga Kefalogianni, called earlier this summer for tighter regulation of tourists: “We must set quotas because it’s impossible for an island such as Santorini… to have five cruise ships arriving at the same time.”
The Prime Minister added on Sunday that “Greece does not have a structural overtourism problem”, pointing out that overtourism was not a problem everywhere, but in specific destinations. “Some of its destinations have a significant issue during certain weeks or months of the year, which we need to deal with,” he said.
Greece relies heavily on tourism, the main driver of the country’s economy, which is still recovering from a decade-long crisis.
Greek tourism revenues stood at about €20 billion in 2023, from nearly 31 million tourist arrivals.
Holiday destinations across Europe have struggled with excessive tourist numbers since the pandemic, with protesters in places including Mallorca, Barcelona and Venice calling for curbs on tourism.