Up to 16,000 tourists arrive daily on the Mediterranean island of Capri, outnumbering the 12,900 residents, and many of these visitors also stay overnight, as more and more houses are rented out to tourists, which creates problems for residents, reports Reuters, quoted by Agerpres.
“Capri has become a bedroom for tourists. There are more people arriving on the island than we can handle and families cannot take root here because they cannot afford to stay”, says Teodorico Boniello, president of the local consumer association.
The Mediterranean island is a microcosm for many hot tourist destinations in Europe. Locals depend on tourists for their livelihoods, but the explosion of mass tourism risks turning their beautiful locations into suffocating crowds.
Some Italian cities have begun to react. Venice recently became the first city in the world to charge an entrance fee for visitors during peak periods. Florence has banned new housing rentals in its historic center and the Cinque Terre park on the Italian Riviera has started charging 15 euros for those who want to walk a popular route along the coast, in a bid to avoid overcrowding.
Capri has doubled its own visitor tax, from €2.50 to €5, which outsiders must pay to take the ferry from Naples or Sorrento to the island of Capri, starting in April and ending in October.
“We are trying to convince more people to visit us during the winter,” says the mayor of Capri, Marino Lembo.
But the tax is unlikely to deter tourists from traveling to the island of Capri, which has more than four million Instagram-tagged photographers and is attracting waves of tourists looking to add the same images to their social media pages.
More importantly, locals say the tax will do nothing to solve a housing crisis that forces many of Capri’s essential workers, including teachers and doctors, to live on the mainland and commute to the island.
An example is Antonio De Chiara, 22, who gets up every morning at 5.20 in his town near Naples to make sure he catches the 7 am ferry, which takes him to the island of Capri in 50 minutes. Next to him are 400 commuters who daily cross the bay to Capri.
“It would be great to live in Capri but it is very difficult. Even if I could find a place, the rent would consume almost all of my salary,” says Antonio De Chiara, who recently got a job as a child psychologist in Capri.
Stefano Busiello, 54, is a mathematics teacher at the high school in Capri but lives in Naples and has been commuting for 20 years. “I never tried to find a home there. I couldn’t afford one and the situation became even more difficult”, says Busiello.
Only 20% of the staff at the high school where Busiello is a teacher live on the island of Capri, the rest arriving here by ferry, a grueling daily commute that means most teachers don’t stay more than three years before requesting a transfer to schools on the mainland.
Roberto Faravelli, who runs a guesthouse near Capri’s port, says people like him might be willing to rent their properties to workers if the authorities offered incentives to close the gap with the rents paid by tourists. “The government needs to encourage home owners by offering long-term rentals. What we lack is someone to try to solve these problems”, says Faravelli.
But Mayor Lembo does not expect the authorities to intervene. “It’s an unfortunate situation, but unfortunately that’s how the market economy works,” says the mayor of Capri.
Rental platform Airbnb has more than 500 properties listed on the island of Capri, up from around 110 in 2016. But this is only the tip of the iceberg, with locals renting out their properties during the summer months through platforms that are not regulated.
Despite obvious resentment over the lack of housing, Capri has yet to experience the protests elsewhere, such as Spain’s Canary Islands, where thousands of locals recently took to the streets to demand limits on tourist arrivals.
Mayor Lembo admits there are problems but rejects the idea that tourism is ruining the island. “I don’t agree with the nostalgics who say that the island of Capri was more beautiful 100 years ago. Then there was misery and poverty. Now there is wealth, thanks to tourism”, says Lembo.
