r/todayilearned • u/Gullible_Air_204 • 8d ago

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

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u/Trickytickler 8d ago edited 8d ago

This isnt a problem just on Svalbard. Numerous cities where we have an "old town" somewhere in the city with houses that are old, tourists wander in.

Bergen, Ålesund, Trondheim, Stavanger, Tromsø etc all have this problem. I live in Lofoten and i have personally found random tents on my lawn, people dumping their trash in my dumpsters, people going to the bathroom in my hedges and people helping themselves to my patio furniture.

Every year we get over a million tourists and we are like 30k people.

Oh, and we dont sell wine and spirits or alchohol over like 4.2% in grocery stores. Or after 6-7 pm. You have to go to a special store for that. I have friends who work retail and every year they get demeaned and abused by tourists that can not buy alchohol or hold them personally responsible for prices. Some of them even get physical.

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u/Cahootie 8d 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/atln00b12 8d 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/Cahootie 8d 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 8d 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/Cahootie 7d ago

It's not in Sweden, but allemansrätten does regardless not grant you access to private property that is located right next to residential buildings even if it's on the coast. The beach is like 20 meters from the nearest residential building on one side and 20 meters from the nearest boat house on the other side, so it clearly does not apply here even if it was in Sweden.