Venice launched its 5-euro entry ticket for day tourists on Thursday morning, a device intended to stem overtourism but which arouses reluctance among many residents who refuse to see their city become a “museum”.
For this world first, the UNESCO heritage city sold some 10,000 paid tickets online, Tourism Deputy Simone Venturini told AFP.
These tickets, which are in the form of QR Codes downloadable online, must be presented to controllers stationed in particular on the station square, the main access to the City of the Doges, where the situation on Thursday morning remained fluid in a good-natured atmosphere.
By forcing day tourists to pay five euros to wander along its famous canals, Venice hopes to dissuade some of them from coming on busy days, even if no cap has been set on the number of tickets available for each day.
“I think it’s good because it will perhaps slow down the tourist numbers in Venice”comments Sylvain Pélerin, a French tourist who has been coming there regularly for 50 years, for AFP, proudly showing off his ticket.
On the square in front of the elegant Santa Lucia station, the main point of entry into the city, a ticket office has been set up from scratch to help tourists without this new access.
“An experiment”
Venice thus becomes the first tourist city in the world to impose an entrance fee like a theme park, while movements hostile to overtourism are multiplying, particularly in Spain, pushing the authorities to act to reconcile the good -be residents with a crucial economic sector.
For the tourism assistant, it is “especially to discourage local tourism for residents of the Veneto region who can visit Venice whenever they want.”
Mayor Luigi Brugnaro himself recognized at the beginning of April that“this is an experiment”, which will undoubtedly be closely followed by other major tourist cities around the world.
Its town, one of the most visited in the world, has already banned giant cruise ships from its historic center, whose swarms of passengers will also have to show their credentials.
At peak attendance, 100,000 tourists sleep in Venice, in addition to tens of thousands of daily visitors. Compare to the approximately 50,000 inhabitants of the city center, which continues to depopulate.
At this stage, however, the experience remains very limited in scope: for 2024, only 29 busy days are affected by this new tax, which therefore starts on Thursday, a public holiday in Italy, and is applied almost every weekend of May to July.
Many exemptions
This tax also only targets daily tourists entering the old town between 8:30 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. local time. They will have to download their QR code on the dedicated site (https://cda.ve.it/fr/), available in English, Spanish, French and German, in addition to Italian.
A fine of 50 to 300 euros is planned to punish tourists who try to slip through the cracks, even if local authorities have said they want to favor persuasion over repression.
Tourists sleeping at least one night on site are not affected and will receive a free QR code of their accommodation.
In addition, numerous exemptions are provided, particularly for those under 14 and students.
But this new measure is not unanimous among Venetians, some seeing it as an attack on freedom of movement and a further step towards the museumification of their city.
“We are not a museum or a nature reserve, but a city, we should not pay” to access it, protests Marina Dodino, who is part of a local residents’ association, ARCI Venezia. A demonstration was planned for late morning.
Venice, famous throughout the world for its monuments, its works of art, its bridges and its canals, has been a UNESCO world heritage site since 1987.
In September, however, the city had narrowly escaped being listed as a UNESCO world heritage site in danger, whose experts had estimated that this jewel was threatened by too much tourism and global warming, due to “insufficient” measures. ” taken by Italy to combat the deterioration of the site.
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