COVID-19 empties tourist traps in Europe: Crisis or opportunity?

In Venice, empty gondolas rock at their moorings on the Grand Canal; in Barcelona, desolate shopping streets lie silent.

The coronavirus has taken a devastating toll on European tourist destinations. But some of them, which once groaned uncomfortably under the weight of visitors, are taking the pandemic as a chance to reinvent themselves, to break their profitable but destructive habit of mass tourism.

“Coronavirus has changed the world,” says Paola Mar, in charge of tourism planning and management at the Venice city council. “It is an opportunity for us, an accelerator of change.”

The Italian city of Venice normally hosts an average of 55,000 tourists (more than the city’s population) each day, many of them day-trippers from cruise