New planning legislation approved by the government allowing the mass development of tourist villages throughout Greece has provoked intense criticism from a broad range of scientific and professional bodies and environmental groups who warn that it will lead to serious degradation of Greek islands, coasts and forests.
The Special Framework for Regional Planning and Sustainable Development for Tourism, was officially approved on Thursday and its goal, according to the environment and tourism ministers, is to boost tourism and local economies.
Speaking last week following a meeting with prime minister Antonis Samaras regarding the legislation, tourism minister Olga Kefalogianni said the planning framework was a ‘central pillar’ of the government’s strategy for the development of the tourist industry and would allow Greece to “move away from a model of one-dimensional tourism to multi-dimensional tourism with many more forms and possibilities for development throughout the country.”
At the same time deputy environment minister Stavros Kalafatis claimed that the new framework would allow “truly environmentally friendly economic development.”
This ‘environmentally friendly’ development however apparently involves allowing large tourist developments to be built throughout the entire country. Specifically the framework allows for ‘composite tourist developments’ also known as ‘tourist villages’ to be built anywhere in the Greece, including islands, forests and areas of outstanding natural beauty supposedly protected under national and international frameworks such as the Natura treaty. The villages will be large real-estate developments with housing built according to hotel-type specifications and available for long-term renting or purchase. The only areas excepted from such tourist village developments are archaeological sites and uninhabited islands smaller than 75 acres.
Even more worrying, particularly for islands, is that developments will be permitted regardless of an area’s current capacity and the local use of resources such as water – already in short supply in many areas in the summer, particularly in the Aegean.
Many believe that with the new framework Greece is on track to replicate the disastrous construction boom that occurred in Spain in recent decades which caused many areas of the coastline to be swallowed up by developments. The subsequent housing bust in 2008 has left large numbers of empty houses and half-finished developments throughout the country as seen in this slideshow, and exacerbated the country's economic crisis.
While the government insists that the new framework will allow for truly sustainable economic development, the plans have been rejected not only by environmental groups including WWF Greece but also, according to Kathimerini newspaper (link in Greek), by the National Council of Planning and the Environment, the (entirely business oriented) Chamber of Commerce, Chamber of Hoteliers, Hellenic Federation of Enterprises, Hellenic Confederation of Professionals, Craftsmen and Merchants as well as societies of architects, urban planners and regional development planners.
But the government apparently decided simply to ignore them.
On the other hand, of course, the plan’s supporters include the General Confederation of Workers and the Technical Chamber of Greece – both of whom stand to gain in the short term from a good old-fashioned construction boom – not to mention the developers eager to turn pristine areas like the recently sold Kassiopi peninsula in Corfu into prime real estate developments.