Drought-stricken Mediterranean resorts in Spain, Greece and Cyprus are doing little to make tourism in the region sustainable

Countries bordering the Mediterranean are facing the prospect of water crises in coming years. Fuelling these crises are the 200 million sun-hungry travellers who visit the southern European region each year. Their number is expected to triple to 600 million by 2025, according to WWF.

The campaign group warned about increased numbers of tourists contributing to drought in the region as early as 2004. In a report about the threat of expanding tourism on the Mediterranean’s water supplies, it observed that most resort tourists use “almost four times the daily water consumption of an average Spanish city dweller”.

Some resorts are trying to shed the “water waster” image. Cavo Sidero, a 6,000-acre, 7,000-bed resort planned for the north-eastern side of Crete, is being billed as the largest eco-friendly resort in the region, with construction scheduled to start this year.

But the green tourism trend is far from widespread in the Mediterranean. Many of the area’s hotels claim they have adopted water-saving policies, but in practice these often amount to little more than asking guests to limit the number of towels they use, says Professor Murray Simpson at Oxford University’s Centre for the Environment.

Reaching the limits

Barcelona, Spain’s second largest city, has been forced to import drinking water to alleviate the effects of the country’s worst springtime drought on record. And Cyprus has announced that it will probably start importing water from mainland Greece in June.

While climate change and shifting rainfall patterns are being blamed for part of the shortages, intensive agriculture, urban expansion and water-intensive tourist resorts and golf courses are considered the main drivers of the problem.

Mediterranean water resources are also heavily politicised, particularly in Spain, where large-scale transfers of water to Spain’s arid regions help Madrid secure support from independence-minded regions such as Catalonia, says Pieter de Pous, water policy officer at the European Environmental Bureau in Brussels.

This leads to a continued reliance on supply-side measures, including the construction of energy-intensive desalinisation plants, rather than more sensible water pricing policies and demand-reduction measures, says de Pous.

While tourists are likely to remain sheltered from the water crisis, sooner or later structural limitations will impact on both water quantity and quality, including for popular resorts, according to Simpson. Saltwater seepage into depleted aquifers, poor sanitation networks and eco-system destruction could lead to the spread of insect-borne diseases and a widespread degradation in drinking water quality, he says.

To remain sustainable in the long term, the region’s tourism industry may be best advised to adopt water-saving measures that go beyond washing fewer towels.