Mount Olympus struggles with overcrowding as visitor numbers soar
Mount Olympus is no longer the mountain of the gods but of visitors. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, crowding has spread from roadside tavernas to high elevations, with tents filling the Plateau of the Muses and bottlenecks forming on the trail to the summit, raising safety risks.
In an attempt to prevent unpleasant developments, the Natural Environment and Climate Change Agency will commission a study on visitor management and calculate the carrying capacity of Olympus National Park.
"Visit rates have increased a lot, especially after the coronavirus. But no one knows how many people climb the mountain," says Babis Marinidis, a certified mountain guide. "I remember when I was little, as a member of the mountaineering club, we would go and record how many cars and how many people were climbing, and there were two checkpoints. The forest department did the same job. Of course, as a civil service agency, it only counted from Monday to Friday, so again there was no complete picture," he says.
According to Marinidis, the increase in the number of visitors creates various side effects. "First of all, many people camp wherever they want. In the past, you would see a few tents around the refuges - now on the Plateau of the Muses in the summer you can see up to 150 tents. Many also camp on the other side (of Elassona), near the Christaki shelter, going up in 4x4s on a road that should be closed. In the summer, these two points become like huge tent cities and the people who manage the nearest refuges struggle to cover their needs for water or toilets."
Dr Michael Styllas, a researcher at the Paris Institute of Planetary Physics, has been managing the "Chistos Kakkalos" refuge (at 2,650 meters) with his brother Alexandros since 2004. This refuge, along with the "Giosos Apostolidis" refuge (at 2,697 meters), is located near the Plateau of the Muses. "The number of people on Olympus began to increase gradually from 2012 and exponentially after the end of the economic crisis and the coronavirus. Many visitors are young people, who do not come from mountaineering clubs. The good thing is that the younger generations are more receptive. In the past, you would tell climbers to take their trash with them and they would say, 'You who own the refuge should take it.'" Now people understand and the mountain is clean," he explains.
As for camping, Styllas maintains that tents can only be pitched within the enclosure of the refuges, paying a symbolic fee (4 euros per visitor). "The situation is under control and only concerns the period from July to early September. After that, camping on Olympus is only for hardcore fans anyway, who own special equipment," he says.
It should be noted that there are nine refuges on Mount Olympus, offering 423 beds and six emergency refuges with 54 beds, the period of operation of which depends on weather conditions.
Many people also gather on the trail to Mytikas, the peak of Mount Olympus (2,917 meters). "On weekends, it's crammed," says Marinidis. "Unfortunately, there are self-proclaimed mountain guides who have a nice presence on social media, but no training, who take people up the mountain without respecting safety measures."
Styllas agrees with this view. "We call these companies 'pirates.' With the experience I have, 40 years as a mountaineer and 20 years as a refuge manager, I think it's only a matter of time before an accident happens because of them. The situation is a free-for-all. I have seen people tied to their trouser belts as a supposed safety measure. There shouldn't be too many people on the trails leading to the summit at the same time because rocks fall, it's dangerous. The situation is even worse at the foothills, where the waterfalls are. These points are accessible by car and as a result there is a real [environmental] disaster due to the number of people. The water shines from the sunscreens - the very water that the surrounding villages drink."
In France, Styllas is part of a team of scientists researching the alpine soils on the Plateau of the Muses and the quality of the waters after the Prionia area. "Monitoring is needed to assess the impact. These things are not done on the fly," he explains.
At the beginning of the decade, the then management body of Olympus National Park commissioned a study to calculate the carrying capacity and a visitor management plan. However, the resources allocated were very limited and so the study ended up being just a first approach to the issue. It was prepared by a scientific team from the Greek Biotope/Wetland Center (EKBY), a branch of the Goulandris National History Museum in Thessaloniki. The study estimated visitors at around 200,000 per year.
"While everyone recognizes the pressures on Mount Olympus, no substantial steps have been taken to manage visitors," says Maria Katsakiori, scientific manager of the study. "The main issue is that there are many entry points to the mountain and it is extremely difficult to control access. As a result, many issues arise: the uncontrolled pitching of tents, the vandalism of signs and infrastructure (e.g. kiosks), the erosion of paths. There are simple things that could be done, such as serving visitors with a small bus from Litochoro instead of allowing private cars, but they clash with local petty interests."
The Greek Natural Environment and Climate Change Agency (OFYPEKA) recently announced a new tender for a study on visitor management and an assessment of the carrying capacity of Olympus. However, the national park has only seven people at its disposal, of which four are guards for an area of more than 58,000 acres.
"There are many issues that concern us in the management of the national park and we hope that the study will give us directions," says Yiannis Mitsopoulos, special adviser to OFYPEKA. "It is obvious that we need to develop a system for recording visitor traffic and determine visitor entry points and parking spaces around the perimeter of the park. We also need to determine the visit rate of the individual areas of the park and capture the carrying capacity of each area, in order to discuss all the rest."
The discussion around the sustainable management of Mount Olympus is not new. It first took place a century ago, during the interwar period, a few years before the mountain, along with Mount Parnassos, were recognized as the country's first national parks. An interesting detail is the proposal submitted at the time by German archaeologists to carve a giant bust of Zeus on the summit of Olympus, which was initially approved by the then government.
The discussion that took place in the 1920s and 1930s is highlighted by a recent scientific publication, signed by Dr Iosif Botetzagias, professor at the Department of Environment of the University of the Aegean, and George Kostopoulos, a PhD candidate in the same department.
"In the summer of 1913, Frédéric Boissonnas, the famous Swiss photographer and mountaineer, and Daniel Baud-Bovy, Swiss writer and art historian, arrived in Thessaloniki, having been awarded a grant by the Kingdom of Greece to photograph areas of Epirus and Macedonia (which had just been annexed by the Greek state). Instead of spending the eight-day quarantine locked up somewhere, they decided to explore Olympus. Thus, on August 2, 1913, together with a Greek local guide, Christos Kakalos, they became the first modern era climbers to conquer the peak," says Botetzagias.
This achievement became the occasion to gradually open a discussion about the development of Olympus. "The logic of the time was the development of mountain ranges using the model of the Alps. The same discussion took place in Greece and concerned the creation of expensive hotels, cable cars and ski facilities on Olympus. In contrast, the naturalist movement that flourished in the interwar period proposed that the mountain should remain as it is and be accessible only to climbers."
The Greek National Tourist Organization decided in 1933 to finance the creation of a ski resort on the mountain. However, the plans did not proceed. "On the one hand, in the early 1930s Greece also sank into economic recession, following the rest of Europe. This was followed by the Metaxas dictatorship in 1936, which promoted a different agenda. The Forest Service had completed the first systematic recording of the flora and fauna of Olympus shortly before the dictatorship, and thus in 1938 it was declared a national park."
An interesting detail is that at the beginning of that decade the archaeological department of the Ministry of Education approved the carving of the head of Zeus near the summit, at an altitude of 2,917 meters. The proposal had been submitted by German archaeologists and had been adopted by domestic associations (such as the Federation of Travel & Tourist Agencies), while German sculptors had volunteered to work for this purpose for free. The proposal, however, was not warmly received - in a letter to Kathimerini on October 1, 1936, Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark described the plan as "foolish."
"The man who had this idea should be kept in a jar so that future generations can flaunt him," he said.
