Cruise ships putting Venice ‘under threat’

Local pressure groups bemoan the presence of enormous cruise ships, some of
which carry in excess of 4,000 passengers and reduce the ancient city to
Lilliputian proportions. Environmentalists claim the wake caused by giant
vessels contributes towards the erosion of the city’s foundations.

In August, a German tourist was struck and killed by a vaporetto (water bus)
while travelling on a gondola with his family, further putting the spotlight
on Venice’s congested waterways, and later that month the cruise ship
Carnival Sunshine passed perilously close to a vaporetto some 20 metres from
the waterfront at Riva dei Sette Martiri, just beyond St Mark’s Square.

Cruise Lines International Assocation, the international association for
cruise lines, maintains that there is “no scientific evidence to prove that
cruise ships displace water in Venice because of the slow speeds at which
the ships travel.” However,
a spokesman also recently told Telegraph Travel that the volume of cruise
traffic using the current navigational route – there were 661 cruise
calls at the port last year – was unsustainable.

Other sites on the WMF’s list included several in Britain (Sulgrave Manor,
Northamptonshire; Battersea Power Station; Deptford Dockyard; and Grimsby
Ice Factory and Kasbah), as well as the churches of Saint-Merri and
Notre-Dame de Lorette in Paris, the ruins of Chan Chan in Peru, and the
Farnese Aviaries in Rome. For more information, see www.wmf.org/watch/project-map

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