It seems as if I have so much information I want to share regarding overtourism, I think I might have to add a second day for a while. As we all know, once fire season starts, we will all be too busy to have this discussion!

Here is the first page of a lengthy article I am reading (I will be posting more of it in the coming weeks, as well as of other lengthy articles):

 

It got me thinking…what are the tourist/resident ratios for other destinations? So I looked up a few: The greatest ratio given is 33:1 Here. However, there are other statistics available and the countries with the highest Yearly Tourist arrivals to residents ratio are Andorra, Macao SAR, China, Sint Maarten (Dutch part), Monaco, Aruba with a(n) Yearly Tourist arrivals to residents ratio of (2,630), (2,349), (1,169), (957), (883) % respectively. (See: http://mecometer.com/topic/yearly-tourist-arrivals-to-residents-ratio/)

So, I did a little math. A conservative estimate of the number of visitors to Big Sur given at the CCC meeting on Friday, 3/22/19 was said to be 5-6 million a year. I will use the lower, more conservative, 5 million. The number of residents in Big Sur, being generous, is approximately 1500. What does that make our tourist to residents ration: 3,333% -greater than any country in the world, by over 700%!!

I’ll let that sink in, for a moment.