The waves of the Aegean Sea lap gently at the tables and chairs of two beach restaurants on Greece’s Halkidiki peninsula. It is an idyllic scene, but one that is totally illegal.
Like many others in Greece, the two establishments on Pefkochori Beach do not have a license to set up shop so close to the water.
After a wave of protests last summer by locals about bars and restaurants illegally covering beaches with sunbeds and tables, the Greek state is taking action. It is cracking down on rogue tourist practices with surveillance drones, satellite imagery and a special app on which people can complain. Beach, is one of many outraged by the inexorable growth of Greece’s tourism industry.
Photo: AFP
“The whole beach has been taken over” with tables, chairs and deckchairs, the 64-year-old pensioner said.
“When we bought our house 40 years ago, it was completely different,” she said. “The beach was empty and it was nice to lie there.”
Greece’s travel sector has rebounded with a vengeance from the COVID-19 pandemic, but the downside is overtourism.
Last year, nearly 33 million people visited Greece, 5 million more than in 2022.
Renting two mattresses and a parasol for a day on the beach in Greece usually costs 20 to 40 euros (US$21 to US$43). Prices are much higher still on some top islands.
However, a pushback has begun.
“The problem with beaches in Greece is entrepreneurs who, either with a permit or through encroachment, cover parts of the coast with sunbeds, umbrellas, tables and even permanent structures,” said beach activist George Theodoridis, who is part of a Halkidiki group that has more than 12,000 members on Facebook.
The first drone flights to spot the rule breakers in Pefkochori began in May, and about 6,000 complaints from the public have since April been logged nationally on the new official MyCoast app, including 680 for the Halkidiki region east of the second city Thessaloniki.
“I can click directly in the app at the location where I am and file a report saying that [this private operator] does not have a license,” Theodoridis said.
Under the new rules introduced in March, umbrellas and deck chairs must be at least 4m from the sea, and no rentals are allowed on beaches that have less than 4m of sand.
In some cases, the added scrutiny has borne results. On the popular tourist island of Rhodes, officials recently suspended the operation of a beach bar that had even put sunbeds in the sea.
“When we say there will be order on the shore, we mean it,” Greek Minister of National Economy and Finance Kostis Hatzidakis said.
His ministry expects to award more than 1,200 new beachfront leases this year in a bid to standardize the situation, on top of the 6,500 that already exist.
The new rules come after a backlash last summer that became known as the “beach towel movement.”
It began on the Aegean island of Paros and spread nationally, with thousands protesting about illegally occupied beaches, forcing the authorities to take notice.
However, the new system is not without shortcomings.
Tourism operators say that state services handling their applications are severely understaffed.
Anastasia Halkia, mayor of the Halkidiki municipality of Kassandra, said inspections there that used to be handled by five local councils have fallen to two staff from the state land service, one of whom just retired.
“It’s something new, so we are all moving gingerly to see how it goes,” she said.
Sofia Papagiannidou, a 23-year-old tourism manager, said her company had submitted all the required paperwork, but was still waiting even though the season was already under way.
“I have no faith in the Greek state,” said another operator who declined to be identified. “My business was fined 39,000 euros last year, and the procedure to collect the fine is still incomplete.
“So technically we have no license to operate, but we are still working” unofficially, he said.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS