Add the Galapagos to the list of countries fighting back against overtourism.
The International Galapagos Tour Operators Association (IGTOA) has asked the government of Ecuador to limit land-based tourism to the islands, and proposed raising the $100 park entrance fee “to help curb ever-growing visitor demand.”
The request follows a July UNESCO World Heritage Committee report that noted concerns over “a steep and continuous increase of visitor numbers” endangering the islands (State of conservation of properties inscribed on the World Heritage List (unesco.org), in the section on the Galapagos starting on page 106). It “renewed its call upon the government of Ecuador to fulfill its commitment to implement a zero-growth Galapagos tourism strategy and to address the issue of land-based tourism growth.”
The report notes that the total capacity of passengers arriving by sea was capped in 1998 —but that just resulted in an “ever increasing popularity of land-based tourism in the islands, facilitated in part by a huge increase in the available number of available hotels and overnight rentals operating in the islands.”
“More people arriving and moving between islands, without concomitant improvements to biosecurity phyto-sanitary controls, greatly increases the possibility that new and potentially devastating invaders could come with them,” the IGTOA website notes. “And land-based tourism, according to the report, ‘carries even larger risks of introduction and dispersal of alien species compared with ship-based tourism.’ Beyond this, explosive tourism growth fuels migration from the mainland, and necessitates more and more shipments of food and other goods from the mainland, a primary vector for the introduction of new and invasive species.”
Executive director Matt Kareus says the group has “repeatedly and publicly called upon Ecuador’s government to implement policies to regulate land-based tourism as effectively and admirably as it has managed ship-based tourism, and to adopt other strategies to curb visitor demand,” and has asked the government to raise the $100 park entrance fee, which “has not been raised in decades and is a fraction of what other top tier national parks around the world charge, to provide much needed funding for biosecurity and park management and to help curb ever-growing visitor demand.”