(TAN): The Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic will bid adieu to tourists for a while in April as it shuts its doors for maintenance.
The volcanic islands, a territory of Denmark, will be out of reach to the public from April 16 to 17, 2020, during which it will be taken over by 100 volunteers to help locals spring clean the isles. Faroe Islands’ tourism board has dubbed the drive as “Closed for Maintenance, Open for Voluntourism”.
The decision was motivated by a similar effort last spring which saw about 100 volunteers from 25 countries take part in maintenance projects selected by local municipal bodies and tourism centres. The pilot programme had temporarily closed ten tourist sites in the 18-island archipelago for their conservation.
“Projects completed by the Maintenance Crews over the weekend included creating walking paths in well-trodden areas, constructing viewpoints to help preserve nature and protect birdlife sanctuaries, re-building ancient cairns and erecting signs and posts to aid wayfinding,” the tourism board said on its website.
The board embarked on this mission to draw attention to the problem of overtourism and the damage it can cause to the fragile ecosystems on the planet, even though it claimed that the islands were not yet hurt by overtourism.
“Although the Faroe Islands currently do not suffer from overtourism, the fragile natural environment in a few popular tourist locations has felt the effects of around a 10% growth in visitors over recent years,” the tourism board said.
“Our archipelago, nestled halfway between Iceland and Norway, now sees around 110,000 visitors each year, attracted by the volcanic islands’ dramatic scenery, abundance of birdlife, friendly Faroese people and our 80,000 sheep,” it continued.
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Although the popularity of the Faroe Islands is on the rise, the problem of overtourism has not become as acute as it is in some of the other global destinations, according to Director of Tourism for Visit Faroe Islands, Gudrid Hojgaard.
“We have several places in Europe … where [overtourism is] a very common subject in international press. We’re lucky enough to be quite late in tourism development so we can learn a lot from other destinations and what they have done wrong. This was our test to do a proactive development project,” Hojgaard was quoted as saying by the Washington Post.
In 2020, the voluntourism drive will take place in 14 locations across the isles. Although volunteers will have to pay for their transport to the islands, they will be given “accommodation, food and transport during the maintenance period”.
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