by Socrates George Kazolias:

Like every Summer, we went hiking in the Dolomites and each year since UNESCO declared the Dolomites a World Heritage Site in 2009, we have watched our beloved mountains take a turn for the worse.

Along with UNESCO, Covid and electric mountain bikes added to the decline. Now global Capital is moving in to take over the tourist business.

The UNESCO FIASCO

When UNESCO classified nine regions of the Dolomites, the UN put the mountain ranges on the world map for package tours.

In anticipation of increased tourism, especially from the United States, valley hotels began building extensions to their establishments, despite UNESCO criteria against new constructions. How was this possible? Local, corrupt, officials backdated the building permits, Sud Tirol friends tell us. Yellow cranes  went up throughout the valleys.

Then came the turn of some mountain refuges like Zalinger and TierserAlpl in the Seiser Alm region, converting the once rustic refuges into what are practically hotels. Modern restaurants, more rooms, but not toilets, sometimes one for nearly 100 people.  You can’t invent water up there. A three-minute shower will cost four euros.

A mountain refuge is not meant to have hotel comfort, nor privacy. The washrooms are collective, often with only cold water in the sinks.  It is not uncommon today for some American or Italian woman, new to the Alps and on an organized tour, to lock herself inside a washroom for privacy even though there are nine sinks (Schlernhaus) or to bang on the door for people to hurry even though there is a sink or shower free (TierserAlpl).

Nudity in the washrooms has always been part and parcel of the Sud Tirol experience but the new package tourists never get the memo. The presence of these organized tours means it is no longer possible to call a refuge in the morning or the day before for a bed. Refuges on the tourist map are being booked out months in advance!

COVID in 2021

Then in 2020-2021, Covid travel restrictions led the Italian government to encourage Italian citizens to go to the Alps for vacation. And so they did; by their hundreds of thousands: untrained, inexperienced, ill equipped. (read here for hiking in the Dolomites during COVID restrictions)

This not only exacerbated life in the refuges and forced prior booking on Alpine hikers who had never had to book in advance, but also caused a severe strain on nature and infrastructure. It wasn’t that there were just too many people, but also too many people who knew nothing about the mountains, protecting nature, not picking the Edelweisse, respecting the trails …

Reinhold Messner, the world renown Sud Tirol mountaineer who made the first solo ascent of Mount Everest and the first ascent of Everest without supplemental oxygen, sounded the alarm bells in early summer, 2021.

“Sud Tirol is getting out of hand!” Messner said. Messner wants the government to limit what he calls “picnic tourism” where people arrive in large numbers by car, block up available parking spaces and storm the Alpine pastures.

It has become increasingly harder for us to park our car somewhere for three weeks while we are up hiking from refuge to refuge. Car tourists have destroyed long term parking at Sellajoch (or Sella Pass).

Even finding a parking space during the day to change clothes, pull out your backpacks and leave your car at the lift parking in Compitello has become a nightmare.  If you wait until six o’clock, after the last lift down, your aren’t going to get up, nor hike.

Like Messner, we feel we are a far cry from what one should expect from a protected world heritage site.

MOUNTAIN BIKES

There has always been hostility between mountain bikers and hikers, even violence, over who the trails belong to.  The bikes tear up the paths and force hikers to get out of the way which can cause falls.

But the Covid Invasion of 2020-2021 coincided with the arrival of the electric-mountain bike: more bikes; more inexperienced bikers; more accidents and fights; more torn up trails.

The tendency, some say necessity to survive, of refuges on the major tourist routes (those near ski lifts, roads or package tours) to enlarge also continues. There are not enough beds, not enough water and no plan for improving the capacity.

TierserAlpl is no longer affordable for us and looks like a hotel today. Even one of our favorites, Grasselitenpasshütte, has set up a crane and is in a two-year enlargement construction process!

“Expand or go under,” our Süd Tirol friends tell us, “especially today with investors from abroad coming in.” 

Among the investors mentioned are those from Singapore trying to buy out Sud Tirol hosts in economic difficulty. 

Sud Tiroleans had to learn how to manage what they euphemistically call “our friends from the south,” referring to the Mafia. They are there. You don’t see them. Nobody mentions them. But they came with Italian annexation of Sud Tirol.

The mountains are increasingly becoming a rich man’s playground, especially as the prices of basic necessities in Italy increased 25% in 2023! Refuges can’t make ends meet without increasing prices.

Sud Tirol walks many thin lines; they are a German speaking people who remain profoundly traditional despite repeated attempts by Rome to Italianize them since their annexation after WWI; just one of the many horrendous acts by vengeful and stupid British and French map makers whose blunders we are still paying for today.

SUD TIROL IDENTITY

The Sud Tiroleans assert their identity in many ways, not the least of which by referring to the others as “the Italians” as in “the Italians are coming to the fair too.”

They have made a workable peace with the Mafia, resisted forced Italianization, including the attempt to ban the speaking of German and attempts to change their names under Mussolini’s Fascists, fought a guerrilla war against Rome for autonomy in the 1950s and 60s to be able to use their language and have a say in how things are run in their house. The Sud Tirol parliament is located in Bozen and quotas on German speaking criteria are imposed on everything from teachers to doctors and nurses.

Globalization and its finance capital are a serious threat to the Sud Tirol way of life, to their own control of their tourist industry, and to their ‘national’ identity, although they remain very much the same as the Tiroleans who remained in Austria after the partition.

How can they resist the globalists when the EU imposes the free movement of money and investment on the different peoples of Europe? UNESCO, making the Dolomites a World Heritage Site, has increased the arrival of international finance strangling local businesses—it just takes one to sell for a whole valley to face a hostile takeover.

This globalist money will convert our beloved mountains, farms and towns into a kind of soulless Disneyland much like Paris and Strasbourg are today; “pretty houses all stuffed with ticky-tacky.”

THE UGLY AMERICAN TOURIST

American tourists must be the worst in the western world. They take pride in knowing as little about the people and places they visit as is humanly possible. Beyond a further demonstration of just how bad the basic US education system is, it all further demonstrates how ignorance and arrogance go hand-in-hand to make the world a gutless, rich man’s, playground: ticky-tacky, hot showers, private washrooms, ski lifts, and electric bikes are all they care about.

Once again, in one of our favorite refuges, I heard Americans who had been in Sud Tirol for a week, comment on how “unexpected it is that everybody here speaks German although we are in Italy.”  After a week in Sud Tirol, they never bothered to look up on their cell phones “Why do they speak German in Sud Tirol?”

And, of course, the only place names they knew were the Italian ones; Sud Tirol is Alto Adige, Bozen is Bolzano, and so on. They didn’t notice there is nothing Italian about the food, nor clothing either. The only thing that counts is the façade, not the ticky-tacky inside.

Sometimes, I lose my patience with their apparent pride in knowing nothing, and caring even less.  I lashed out in Grasselitenhütte:

“They speak German because French and British map makers gave this part of Austria to Italy for sucker-punching the Austrians in World War One even though they promised neutrality. Sud Tirol was given to the Italians even though they lost. The people here fought a guerrilla war to keep their language, their way of life and their property and the refuge you are in was one of the hiding places for the freedom fighters.”

Read a book! Spend your money at home! Go away!

If you like my journalism, you can support me at PayPal.me/SocratesGeorge