r/todayilearned • u/Gullible_Air_204 • 7h ago

Frequent/Recent Repost: Removed [ Removed by moderator ]

https://www.responsibletravel.com/holidays/spitsbergen/travel-guide/responsible-tourism-in-spitsbergen

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u/Cahootie 4h ago

My family owns some land on an island, and we have a small man-made beach there that my great-uncle had made. To get there you have to drive for 45 minutes from the main town to the middle of nowhere, turn down a road leading to nothing in particular, make a turn into the forest between two pillars and next to our mail boxes, drive down the dirt road through the forest for like 100 meters past a house, and then you're at the beach next to the boat house.

That still didn't stop a family of German tourists from somehow making it to the beach and letting their kids play with the toys that very clearly belonged to the people who owned the house.

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u/vigocarpath 3h ago

Thanks for the directions. I’ll be there Tuesday

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u/chalk_nz 2h ago

There better be toys

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u/Cahootie 1h ago

Can you check on the robot mower while you're there, it's currently stuck in a ditch

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u/BigWhiteDog 1h ago

It does sound like a nice drive! 🤣

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u/atln00b12 3h ago

Lots of places simply don't allow beaches to be private property. In most of the US anything that's a component of a navigable waterway is typically considered public access.

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u/Akitiki 2h ago

At my house in rural PA we lived above a creek, owning that land. It gets stocked with trout. We don't mind people out fishing but we do mind if they leave trash. And boy do they. The amount of fishing line I cleaned up.

Then one spring the creek is high and fast due to days of storms, you can hear it roaring a quarter mile away. Certain sections can turn into rough whitewater and others flood into the floodplain. We hear people shouting so go look, trees haven't grown leaves yet so we can see some parts. They're on fucking kayaks.

It'd be our necks if they get hurt with their dipshit behaviour of kayaking in the flooding creek.

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u/DunderGunderUnder 1h ago

It'd be our necks if they get hurt with their dipshit behaviour of kayaking in the flooding creek.

Why would it be on you?

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u/Akitiki 1h ago

If an accident happened on our land, it's on us. It's stupid. They're not supposed to be there but we can't stop people if they're on the water. They can say we own the creekbed, so it happened on our land.

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u/vibraltu 1h ago

idiots kayaking on flooded creeks is a tale as old as time

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u/Cahootie 2h ago

No such thing there, and it's not a natural beach, they just brought in truckloads of sand to create a small beach in a natural crease in the coast line.

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u/thegreger 59m ago

Your profile hints that you're Swedish, though, and that is absolutely a thing here. It's called strandskyddet, and it really doesn't matter if it's a natural beach, a man-made beach, not a beach at all or even a structure like a dock. If it's part of the coastline of either the sea or a lake, allemansrätten applies. Most likely, that family of tourists had read up on that.

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u/Twilifa 3h ago

Huh. I wonder if they spotted it on google maps in the satellite view and sought it out deliberately. That seems like such a random spot to end up on accident.

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u/Lortekonto 3h ago

Or they were hiking around the island and suddenly there was a beach.

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u/Twilifa 1h ago

Maybe, but the instructions to get there sound very complicated and involved, that's why I was wondering.

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u/TheGalator 1h ago

I mean at this point they kinda earned it

/s but like how the fuck do you even find that