Inhabitants of Belgium’s cobblestone-and-canal city of Bruges are clear: Summertime tourism has hit capacity.
“It’s really reached a red line now,” 55-year-old architect Arnout Goegebuer said, as he sat inside a cafe, peering out a window across a packed outside terrace.
“We don’t need more tourists anymore, it’s enough — maybe a little bit less” is needed, he said.
Photo: EPA-EFE
It is a sentiment reiterated by other residents of the western city, population 119,000, which each year hosts 8 million visitors — most of them concentrated in the summer months, and most of them on day trips.
Residents are not against tourism, which brings money and prestige and provides jobs, but they say it needs to be balanced, to stop the city turning into a Disneyfied open-air museum.
With Bruges crowds back to pre-COVID-19 levels, including from cruise ships docking in nearby Zeebrugge port and disgorging passengers who spend just a few hours, “there’s a lot of trouble” for locals, said Kurt Van Der Pieter, a 62-year-old retiree who lived his whole life in the city.
“People of Bruges say it’s too much. It’s too much — very too much some days,” he said.
The situation is not unique to Bruges. Europe’s other top historical canal cities of Venice and Amsterdam have both taken steps to bar cruise ships calling. Venice received a wake-up call last month when UNESCO recommended the city be put on its endangered list because of over-tourism and other problems.
A ranking published in August last year by an Airbnb Inc competitor Holidu put Venice, Bruges and the Greek island of Rhodes in equal second place in its list of the most overcrowded European destinations based on the number of tourists versus inhabitants.
The Croatian walled city of Dubrovnik — famed as the backdrop for much of the Game of Thrones fantasy TV series — ranked first on the list.
Bruges’s tourist authority, Visit Bruges, disputes Holidu’s ranking and says its own figures, based on usage of mobile devices while in Bruges, show 131 daily visitors per 100 inhabitants.
“Bruges is often referred to as a mass tourism destination, but it isn’t,” Visit Bruges spokeswoman Ann Plovie said.
“This is like a bit [of a] misconception that the city is overcrowded. Indeed, I can’t deny that there are many tourists, but you should come on different periods and then you would see also the difference,” another spokeswoman, Anne De Meerleer, said.
In 2019, Bruges implemented a five-year strategy to boost overnight stays, spread the tourist numbers around geographically and over each year, and to lure visitors more interested in cultural and gastronomic deep-dives than selfies and waffles.
“Our aim is to get not more visitors, not the volume is important, but the kind of visitors we get,” De Meerleer said, as she guides a visitor to tourist spots that are almost empty and are just a couple of streets from the main market square.
The results of the strategy are unclear, torpedoed by the 2020-2021 collapse in tourism caused by COVID-19 travel restrictions around the world. Bruges’ city center also faces tensions over accommodation options for overnight stays, with a halt to buildings being converted to hotels to ensure locals are not squeezed out.
Unlike cities such as Milan, Bruges has not banned private vehicles from its historic district, although the railway station is a short walk away. Vehicle registration plates come from all over Europe.
The Belgian city is already at work on its next five-year strategy, this one with an emphasis on sustainability.
The mix of tourists walking around in Bruges is even broader, as is their verdict as to whether they found the place overcrowded or not.
“I didn’t think there would be this much people,” said Lee Hotae, a South Korean tourist admiring the city architecture in a guided group visit.
“It’s not that busy actually. It’s like going to somewhere that’s as nice as Amsterdam or Florence or Venice, but not as overrun,” said a Scottish tourist, Ross Henderson, 43.
A 59-year-old French tourist, Ariele Delattre, who had made the short trip to Bruges from her hometown of Lille, near the Belgian border, said that a canal boat ride revealed the tourist diversity.
The boat’s driver “asked what nationalities were present on the boat, and it’s true that we had Asians, Germans, Britons, French, Indians — people from everywhere,” she said.
Diego Rodriguez, a 41-year-old Venezuelan tourist walking around in a Spanish-speaking guided tour, said he found the tourist numbers “fine like this, especially as we’re in the summer months, the vacation months.”
He added that he had visited Bruges a couple of months earlier “and it was emptier, but it was spring and it was colder, people weren’t on holiday.”
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday obtained the government’s approval to inject an additional US$7.5 billion into its US subsidiary, the Department of Investment Review said in a statement. The department approved TSMC’s application of investing in TSMC Arizona Corp, which is engaged in the manufacturing, sales, testing and design of IC and other semiconductor devices, it said. The latest capital injection follows a US$5 billion investment for TSMC Arizona approved in June. The chipmaker has broken ground on two advanced fabs in Arizona with aggregated investments approved by the department totaling US$24 billion thus far. According to TSMC, the first Arizona
The lethal hack of Hezbollah’s Asian-branded pagers and walkie-talkies has sparked an intense search for the devices’ path, revealing a murky market for older technologies where buyers might have few assurances about what they are getting. While supply chains and distribution channels for higher-margin and newer products are tightly managed, that is not the case for older electronics from Asia where counterfeiting, surplus inventories and complex contract manufacturing deals can sometimes make it impossible to identify the source of a product, analysts and consultants say. The response from the companies at the center of the booby-trapped gadgets that killed 37
FRIENDLY TAKEOVER: While Qualcomm Inc’s proposal to buy some or all of Intel raises the prospect of other competitors, Broadcom Inc is staying on the sidelines Qualcomm Inc has approached Intel Corp to discuss a potential acquisition of the struggling chipmaker, people with knowledge of the matter said, raising the prospect of one of the biggest-ever merger and acquisition deals. California-based Qualcomm proposed a friendly takeover for Intel in recent days, said the sources, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information. The proposal is for all of the chipmaker, although Qualcomm has not ruled out buying some parts of Intel and selling off others. It is uncertain whether the initial approach would lead to an agreement and any deal is likely to come under close antitrust scrutiny
SECURITY CONCERNS: The proposed ban on Chinese autonomous vehicle software and hardware would go into effect with the 2027 and 2030 model years respectively The US Department of Commerce today is expected to propose prohibiting Chinese software and hardware in connected and autonomous vehicles on US roads due to national security concerns, two sources said. US President Joe Biden’s administration has raised concerns about the collection of data by Chinese companies on US drivers and infrastructure as well as the potential foreign manipulation of vehicles connected to the Internet and navigation systems. The proposed regulation would ban the import and sale of vehicles from China with key communications or automated driving system software or hardware, said the two sources, who declined to be identified because the