Several of France’s heavily visited natural sites are sounding the alarm. Access to some of the Calanques coves in Marseille and Corsica is now limited in order to limit erosion. Other villages struggling with mass tourism, such as Étretat in Normandy, are rethinking how they handle the influx of visitors.
Can the cliffs of Étretat in Normandy really handle their million visitors every year? As France heads into the high season of summer holidays, Shaï-Hannah Mallet-Bitton, an activist with the Étretat Demain association, is preoccupied with this question. “Every year it gets worse, and it’s happening more quickly. I’m only 28 years old and even I can see how much the site has been degraded,” sighs the lawyer, who spent part of her childhood in this village of 1,400 inhabitants in Normandy.
