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 | Consequences of tourism at the Turkish Riviera |
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One of my latest travels brought me to the south coast of Turkey, which is currently promoted as the “Turkish Riviera”. I had visited this region already in the 1980’s before people were actually calling it “Riviera”. By then it was just opening up again for the world after having been forgotten for almost 500 years. After this incubation time the area was not only facing a different world, but also had to undergo a change of name. A military coup on their shoulders, people were hungry for interaction with the rest of the world just like their ancestors 2000 years ago. Therefore it is not surprising that the locals were dying for re-opening the region to tourism, which was utterly necessary for mainly two reasons: relieving the political tension in the country and also hardly needed foreign currency. People who knew this beautiful location were of course aware of its potential regarding tourism before anything had really started. But there was of course a downside. The country was not politically stable enough for proper investments. Nevertheless, money started to flow into the country and piled up in the 1990s. As in Spain, it was mainly used to replace the beautiful landscape in the South and West by concrete. Since there was no exact planning, civil society groups had no starting point for their protests which were not powerful enough to stop the devastation of nature.
Still to this day, “concrete building fever” is alive and kicking although less than a couple of years ago. When Turkey was formally informed about commencement of negotiation for accession to the EU, the real estate business started to blossom, but now the country is facing the new problem of the worldwide economic crisis, which affects the economy of Turkey enormously, due to the money coming in from selling real estate. Many villas along the Turkish coast had been built with money that people didn’t actually own.
Although this development has almost come to a halt, the created environmental disaster cannot be rolled back. Devastation of nature is certainly not a singular phenomenon to the Turkish Riviera but what struck me was that people don’t even try to create a fake appearance. Trash walls the sides of the roads and is inconsiderately and without the blink of an eye thrown into forests and other natural environments. Building hotels and villas for foreign vacationers doesn’t seem to be a problem at all, as long as you know the right people to support you with a license. Getting a star classification for a hotel seems also to be a piece of cake too without even conforming to any standard criteria. Therefore the question arises whether there is a future for a society, which is treating the environment with so much disregard.
On my journey I went to a canyon close to Fethiye-Oludeniz (Oren koyu- village), which is supposed to have a wild river full of trout. To my surprise the river was turned into fishing farms exploiting nature to a great extent. The area smelt like a plant producing pharmaceuticals. Nothing was left of the scent of wild blossoming oregano that used to grow in that neighborhood.
This ecological devastation is just one example of the current situation. The unnumbered, uncontrolled newly built hotels and villas have also a negative effect on the whole economics of the Mediterranean region. Tourism like this has no future for any party. It is not sustainable economically or ecologically.
Staying at the Turkish Riviera is cheap compared to stays at the French or Italian Riviera, so cheap that it doesn’t even cover the ecological costs. This low cost tourism is already affecting the tourism activities of the surrounding countries and who knows how long it will take until this whole business is going to collapse.
But it can also work the other way around: a tight governance in regard to ecological preservation such as may be found on the Datça peninsula (antique name Knidos). It may have been too tight but maybe that is better than having no governance at all.
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by: M. Gezik
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