Sintra, Lisbon, Aug. 20, 2024 (Lusa) - Residents and shopkeepers in Sintra are unhappy with rampant tourism and are demanding measures against the excess of visitors, who they accuse of causing traffic chaos, jeopardising mobility and the safety of the town's residents.
To demand ‘sustainable’ measures from Sintra town council, in the Lisbon district, the QSintra association has started a protest with posters that residents and shopkeepers are putting up on buildings, especially in areas that are a transit point for tourists who travel to the historic centre on a daily basis.
This visual protest reads that "the capacity is exhausted" in Sintra, which "is not Disneyland", nor an "amusement park", but a town with UNESCO-listed heritage, where excessive tourism is causing chaos in the streets, harming "residents and visitors" and which could, in the event of an accident, put "people and property at risk".
Madalena Martins, a resident and head of the QSintra association, said that the traffic blocking the access roads to the town centre ‘for most of the day’ is just the ‘most visible’ issue in a ‘wider’ and systemic problem ‘of a lack of planning and a lack of competence in managing the area and a lack of control over tourist resources’.
‘It's clear that tourism is very important for Sintra. Nobody can deny that. However, it has to be tourism that is a factor in development and that is beneficial to the area as a living and inhabited heritage, and not tourism that, through excess and lack of control, ends up destroying what it wants to exploit," she said, emphasising that chaos also ends up causing a negative experience for visitors.
She emphasised that residents are giving up on living in this daily ‘hell’, where those who need a car to go shopping, to the doctor or to work are ‘blocked’ from coming and going.
‘And depopulation leads to de-characterisation, doesn't it? And de-characterisation, in time, also leads to the devaluation of places as quality tourist destinations. And that's what's happening in Sintra. And only those who don't want to can't see it,’ she said.
In Rua do Roseiral, Martinho Pimentel, who has lived in Sintra for 23 years, already knows that his access to the street is difficult between the hours of 10 am and 4 pm.
It's at this time of the morning that the first train with tourists arrives at Portela de Sintra station, and then the TVDE (ride hailing app taxi service) and ‘tuk tuk’ hustle and bustle up there towards Pena Palace and Quinta da Regaleira, because ‘it's cheaper to go by TVDE than by public transport’, until the road ends up being clogged with vehicles at a snail's pace.
‘I feel more confined than during the Covid-19 lockdown. I found it easier to leave the house then than I do now. [...] And this is constant with all the residents and also with the shopkeepers,’ he said.
Martinho Pimentel stressed that the shopkeepers who are right in the centre of the town, where tourists walk by and always buy something, don't complain, but ‘everyone who's already a bit away from that centre’ is affected.
‘Traditional commerce has practically disappeared from here. There's practically nothing left, just a stationery shop and a grocery store. Not even a pharmacy,’ he added.
Isabel Pinto Coelho, who has been running the São Pedro 26 restaurant on the way to the centre for 15 years, confirmed that the excess of tourists is bad for her business.
Many of the regular customers, those who sustain the restaurant all year round, end up giving up when the traffic doesn't allow them to arrive at the time of their reservation.
‘It is the worst summer year I've had here, the worst year ever in terms of customers, because it's not a place where tourists walk to stay. So it's really bad for me on all levels. And then I think it's horrible for someone to have a beautiful terrace and have to eat with pollution,’ she said.
According to the restauranteur, the situation is also causing foreign residents who bought homes there to enjoy a quality of life to give up, as thay have discovered that the idyllic village is not what they imagined it to be.
‘Nobody can stand this,’ she said, while pointing to the houses of foreign neighbours who have stopped living there.
Another major fear is safety, as the narrow, car-filled streets make it difficult for emergency services to access.
‘Neither ambulances nor fire engines can get through. And there are already examples of this, of accidents happening and people waiting for an hour or more to be rescued,’ said Madalena Martins.
Isabel Pinto Coelho argued that more car parks should be built outside the town, with smaller electric buses taking people to the centre.
Martinho Pimentel, meanwhile, felt that, in addition to the occasional management of traffic flows and directions, it would be ideal if public transport buses could tend to be free of charge for access to monuments.
‘There are ways of raising money for this. The number of visitors is so high in Sintra that if the palaces had a tourist tax they could easily finance something like this. And it's only necessary that it's not more expensive to go by public transport than by TVDE for people to make that decision. But at the moment the rational decision is to drive up,’ she said.
Madalena Martins also emphasised that there are ‘several factors that could be easily controlled’, namely one that ‘seems obvious’, which is to better inform visitors.
‘There is no information, not in the tourism apps, not anywhere, not even on the IC19 (main road from Lisbon to Sintra). There's no information about the traffic in Sintra, about how people should come, where people can stop, if at all. [...] Therefore, the council's incompetence is, in every respect, blatant,’ she said.
The association hopes that ‘all this expression of protest and concern’ expressed by the campaign of posters on the façades ‘will have some reflection’ on the policies of Sintra town council.
'What we're also trying to do is alert all the entities that are responsible, in whatever way, for the management of this area, to the situation we're experiencing here. And I'm talking about the Portuguese Tourist Board, the Ministry for Culture, the ICNF [Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests], the Portuguese Agency for the Environment. All these organisations have responsibilities here and have to work together with the council to find sustainable solutions,’ she said.
Madalena Martins also highlighted a report by ICOMOS (a non-governmental organisation made up of experts and associated with UNESCO), which considered Sintra to be a place with ‘heritage at risk’.
‘We believe that if a UNESCO mission came here, it would certainly find many, many reasons to at least alert the authorities and threaten declassification,’ she said.
On this subject, the Sintra town council referred Lusa to a previously released statement, in which it assured that it has tried to adopt measures to ‘balance’ the benefits of tourism with its impact on the historic centre.
The municipality also recalled that, in addition to the traffic restrictions in the historic centre, it has built a peripheral car park with 550 spaces next to Portela de Sintra railway station and is building two more in Ramalhão, next to the main entrance to the town, one of which with 500 spaces and the other for cars and motorhomes.
In 2023, the Sintra Tourist Offices catered for 522,176 tourists.
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