Tourists Trampling Treasures Western Europe’s Historical Legacies Suffer Thanks To A Never-Ending Wave Of Visitors

When I visited Europe in 1972 with my college boyfriend, we made a beeline for Stonehenge, the famed prehistoric monument in the south of England.

None of my reading about Stonehenge prepared me for this spectacular site. There it stood - a ring of huge, geometrically-arranged stone slabs lugged great distances over many lifetimes - standing isolated, unheralded, and nearly un-touristed at the side of a road on Salisbury Plain. We spent the day walking among the ruins, and touching and photographing surfaces that had been pounded centuries ago by stone hammers.

This summer, I went back to Europe with the boyfriend (now husband), and our two children, and we were anxious to return to Stonehenge.

I barely recognized the place. The monument may have been sitting unaltered on Salisbury Plain for 4,000 years, but the last 25 have certainly done a number on it.

Even early in the morning, it was hard to find a parking space because the site was crawling with tourists. To get to the ruins, we had to pass through a concrete tunnel under a heavily-trafficked highway, and squeeze through crowds swarming the gift shop and the Stonehenge Kitchen (featuring Megalithic Rock Cake and Heel Stone Bread Sticks.) We couldn’t approach the stones because they were roped off; in some places, we had to stand back at a distance about half the length of a football field. Tourists saw the stones by circling them, merry-go-round style, and carrying audio-interpreted recordings that explained their significance.

“It was roped off because there was so much damage to the stones,” explained Carolyn Ronning, a tour guide for English Heritage, the organization that maintains Stonehenge. “It’s sad. People were going to Amesbury (a nearby town), and hiring hammers and chisels and taking pieces of the stones away. They were painting it with spray paint.”

Stonehenge may be an extreme example, but the ravages of tourism and contemporary life - on top of the ordinary ravages of time - have affected many of the historic legacies in Western Europe. The number of international tourists to Europe has nearly tripled in the last 25 years, jumping from 130,000 visitors in 1972 to 351,612 in 1996, according to the Madrid-based World Tourism Organization.

And a huge percentage of these tourists are passing through the same ticket booths. Stonehenge now draws three-quarters of a million visitors a year, compared with fewer than 100,000 in the early 1970s. Ten years ago, approximately 400,000 tourists visited historic Venice; now the number is closer to 2 million. Some 10 million people flock to the Eiffel Tower and to Notre Dame Cathedral every year. And 2.5 million pour into the Tower of London complex each year. The queues to see the Crown Jewels at the Tower had gotten so long and unwieldy that in 1994 Historic Royal Palaces - the organization responsible for the tower’s conservation - was obliged to open a new Jewel House to display the jewels.

“A century ago, travel was limited to a handful of upper crust people on the Grand Tour,” says Ellen Delage of the U.S. Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites. “Now, travel is more accessible and less expensive, and there is hardly an economic class in the U.S. that doesn’t get on an airplane several times in their lives, to go somewhere on vacation. And a lot of places are over-visited.”

Over-visitation takes many forms. Partly, it’s the annoying effect of vast numbers of people competing for spectator space at historic places not designed for heavy traffic - a phenomenon we encountered many times this summer.

Crowds were everywhere - and they were often huge, jostling, and impatient, making it difficult if not impossible to visit destinations we’d enjoyed 25 years ago. At the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, there were so many tourists queued up for tickets, we gave up and left. We didn’t go back to the prehistoric caves of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac in France, either, since you now have to call two weeks in advance for tickets. And though our kids were lobbying for a visit to Neuschwanstein, the dream castle of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, we were cautioned against it by a tour book that dubbed it “The Tourist Attraction from Hell.”

“We counted 300 people between us and the door, which we reached in about 40 minutes,” wrote the authors of “Europe by Van and Motorhome” describing a visit there during the month of October.

“To make a very long story short, we spent nearly two hours trapped in line, unable to go backward or forward, reading graffiti left on the walls by other bored tourists. Then we were rushed through six rooms and out into another gift shop in 25 minutes flat by a fast-talking guide. In tourist season, the wait begins on the road, miles before you reach the parking lot.”

But there are also indirect, secondary effects of all this tourism, such as air pollution from cars and from tourist coaches that park near historic sites and keep the engines running while the tour group is off touring. (In Arles, France, pollution has caused so much damage to the exterior of St. Trophine Church - one of the last remaining vestiges of the country’s medieval religious heritage - that the World Monuments Fund has initiated an urgent restoration program.)

Then there is the ancient cave painting situation. “Humans produce heat and vapor, and that can change the humidity level and have radical consequences,” says John Stubbs, vice president for programs at the New York-based World Monuments Fund, a private organization that supports the conservation of historic buildings and sites around the world.

As a result, he says, “Many of the caves in France have been closed. The caves at Lascaux are only available on an appointment basis.”

There is also less inadvertent damage, such as the graffiti on the Leaning Tower of Pisa - an historic site that already had plenty of problems. It now tilts so dramatically that tourists aren’t allowed to climb it anymore, and, like Stonehenge, it has been roped off from the public. Or the damage in Venice to the carved marble pillars in Piazza San Marco that date at least to the 13th century.

“You get kids with sneakers climbing to the top to look at the sunset, and ripping off the carved flowers,” said Dr. Randolph Guthrie of New York, chairman of the board of Save Venice, which raises money to preserve works of Venetian art and architecture.

And, of course, there was that spectacular example of tourist folly in Venice in 1989, when the British Rock group Pink Floyd performed on a floating stage off Piazza San Marco for 150,000 fans. The audience left 200 tons of trash in its wake and damaged historic buildings by climbing onto roofs and balconies.

“The tourists filled the whole seashore,” Guthrie said. “They looked like threads on a carpet: You couldn’t see any space under them. They climbed the bell tower. They pooped in every corner. The pictures the next morning were amazing. It looks like the town garbage dump.”

Tourist pollution takes other forms, too, such as “threats to the meaning of a building,” said Jean-Louis Luxen, secretary-general of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, in a telephone interview from Paris. “The meaning is lost. Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris is a church, a temple. When millions visit it, it no longer has spiritual value.”

Indeed, when we visited the cathedral 25 years ago, the experience was thoroughly uplifting. “At the time we were there, there happened to be a choir singing choral music that reverberated sweetly throughout the whole building,” my then-boyfriend wrote in a journal entry that day. “It was something like what you might hear on a record, except with much more presence.”

Today, says Luxen, Notre Dame Cathedral “is crowded. People talk loudly. It is no longer a temple. It is a marketplace.”

And, of course, where there are tourists there will be rampant commercialism, never more evident than this past summer. Twenty-five years ago, the Tower of Pisa was a quiet, isolated landmark. During our more recent visit, the field surrounding it was packed with kiosks and vendors selling cheesy souvenirs that tilt. Everyone in Pisa, it seems, wants to make a few lira these days. Stop at a traffic light and you’d swear you were in Manhattan: young men brandishing window squeegees appear out of nowhere to charge you to wash your windows. The gondoliers in Venice who charged $10 in 1972 for a ride around the canals have now hiked their fees to between $80 and $100. Our high-priced gondolier lamented the changes in his profession since he started 18 years ago.

“It used to be that when a gondolier died, he’d give his (gondolier permit) to his son. Now, you just go and buy a permit. It used to be more brotherly. Now it’s more commercialized.”

Nor is the Italian situation unique. There are so many gift shops in Interlaken, Switzerland, peddling Swiss army knives, Heidi souvenirs, lace handkerchiefs and cowbells that we nicknamed it Interschlocken. The ever-popular Tower of London has not one but four gift shops selling merchandise ranging from replica crown jewels to a Tower of London board game.

What is to be done about all this? “I’m happy to say their is a global network of preservationists who are reading off the same songsheets,” said Stubbs of the World Monuments Fund. His own organization is in that choir: recently the group announced at a press conference its “List of 100 Most Endangered Sites” to identify cultural heritage sites that are at risk, and seek funds for their rescue.

A lexicon has sprung up among preservationists to describe the kinds of problems at hand. “The buzzword is sustainability,” said David Batchelor, the Stonehenge archeologist; others speak of “tourist pollution,” and “responsible tourism” and “tourist engineering.”

“The main point is that those who are in charge of the management of the sites must always keep command of the number of visitors and the number of coaches,” says Luxen. “For example, at the Museo del Prado (in Madrid), there is a limit set now. They check the number going in and coming out, and when it reaches a maximum, they ask people to wait.”

Still, there is no easy answer to this phenomenon, given that entrepreneurialism can give a needed boost to regional economies. “I don’t know of any organized movement against commercialism,” says Stubbs. Nor is there likely to be a movement to discourage tourism, at least in Italy, says Randolph Guthrie of Save Venice. “There is a tremendous egalitarian spirit in Italy,” Guthrie says. “It would never work to say, ‘Gee, we ought to charge people $5 a head to cross that bridge.”’

Even at places such as Stonehenge, where an effort has been made to preserve historical integrity, there is a lot of debate about the results.

“The way Stonehenge is presented is a national disgrace,” argues Philip Whitbourn, secretary of the United Kingdom arm of the International Council on Monuments and Sites.

“One should not see that remarkable prehistoric monument approached through a rather nasty concrete tunnel, with little huts for tickets, and bits of concrete paving, and nasty signs around the place. And the Stonehenge Kitchen, it is not all right, and everyone recognizes it is not all right, and for 10 years or more people have been trying to do something about it, but for various reasons it hasn’t happened.

“It’s good that people are interested in these places,” the impassioned Whitbourn says. “But having those commentaries clipped to one’s ear as one contemplates those prehistoric stones - it’s not my scene, really.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: ENDANGERED SITES The World Monuments Fund recently announced its list of the world’s 100 most endangered sites, citing carelessness, mismanagement, and misguided governmental policies as among the causes. Twenty of these sites are in Western Europe. Among them are: Ancient Pompeii, Italy. Botanical Garden of Padua University; Padua, Italy. Etruscan painted tombs of Tarquinia; Tarquinia, Italy. Limonaia at Boboli Gardens and Gardens of Villa Medici at Castello, Florence. Neopitagorica Basilica; Rome, Italy. Palazzo Doria Pamphili; Valmotone, Italy. Rupestrian Churches of Puglia and the city of Matera, Italy. Windmills of Mallorca, Spain. Hadlow Tower; Tonbridge, England. Mussenden Temple; Castlerock, Northern Ireland. St. Francis Church and Monastery; Manchester, England. Chateau of Chantilly; Chantilly, France. Radio and Television Building; Brussels, Belgium. Wortel Colony Estate; Hoogstraten, Belgium.