In Estonia, locals complain that Tallinn's Old Town is overrun with tourists and is gradually becoming a place where locals have fewer and fewer reasons to live and visit, reports LSM.lv.
A major study on the sustainable development of Tallinn's Old Town was recently completed. For the study, researchers compared Tallinn and Venice, both well-known tourist destinations.
They found that before the pandemic, Tallinn's Old Town was no less popular than Venice's Old Town in terms of tourist numbers. In 2017, Venice received around 24 million tourists, while Tallinn received 4.5 million. Most of them came to the Old Towns, which cover 646 and 110 hectares respectively. The annual visitor load in both cities is therefore around 40 000 visitors per hectare of attraction. This compares with 470 visitors per inhabitant per year in Venice before the pandemic and 1960 in Tallinn.
In Tallinn's Old Town, the ratio of foreign visitors to local residents was four times higher than in Venice before the pandemic. As a result, the population of Tallinn's Old Town is declining enormously and there are serious concerns that the area is being overrun by tourists and that the Old Town may become too dependent on tourism.
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