2023-07-21 01:37:14
Amsterdam fights against mass tourism. Latest measure: the closure of a major cruise ship terminal in the city center. It is the municipal council of the capital of the Netherlands which today adopted a motion to this effect, confirmed the city. The exact result of the vote has not yet been made public.
This decision is added to a long list of measures recently taken by Amsterdam to combat mass tourism. “Dirty cruises do not correspond to the sustainable ambitions of our city,” said in a press release the liberal center formation D66, at the origin of the motion, which leads the city alongside the social democrats of the PvdA and the environmentalists of GroenLinks.
The D66 also mentions the incompatibility of the passage of cruise ships with “the construction of a second bridge over the IJ towards the Noord district”. Indeed, the southern part of Amsterdam, made up of its historic center, and its northern part, which is the subject of major modernization projects, are separated by the IJ, a former sea arm transformed into a vast artificial lake. And plans to build one or more additional bridges to connect Amsterdam-Noord to the rest of the city have been under discussion for several years.
Tranquility of the inhabitants
“Many cruise passengers are dropped for a few hours and eat their meals in international brands, which has little impact on the middle class,” Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema (GroenLinks) said in November during an interview with the Dutch newspaper NRC, adding that these tourists had “little time” to visit museums.
The municipality of the country’s largest city has implemented several measures in recent months aimed at restoring peace to the inhabitants of its historic center, such as a ban on smoking cannabis in the streets of its Red Light District and the launch of a campaign to dissuade British tourists from traveling to Amsterdam just to consume alcohol and drugs.
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