Livraria Lello in Porto, Portugal, is overwhelmed by tourists.
The bookstore, famous for its beauty and alleged Harry Potter inspiration, charges €8 for entry.
Overtourism at Livraria Lello highlights the need to reduce visitor numbers for a better experience.
Let’s go to Livraria Lello, I said, little understanding what demons – of the overtourism variety – I was about to witness.
Livraria Lello is a bookstore in the gobsmackingly stunning city of Porto, Portugal. It bills itself as “the most beautiful bookstore in the world”. Quitepossibly it is, though I couldn’t tell. There were simply too many people there.
In fact, I’d describe it slightly differently after an abortive visit there: “Maybe it was the most beautiful bookstore in the world but now it’s just a greedy money-making operation”.
When we arrived at the square containing the bookstore, I was astounded to see the queues. In early November. There were hundreds of people waiting. The queues were neatly organised into quarter-hour groups, most of about 50-60 people. As one group was released – and I use that word advisedly – from the store, so another was permitted to enter.
The problem was: too many people and too many of them stayed inside when they should have been exiting. The result was akin to those photographs of the subway in Tokyo years ago, where workers armed with poles pushed and shoehorned commuters into packed carriages.
Livraria Lello was reminiscent of that. There were no poles in use, obviously, but the net effect was the same. The bookstore is undeniably beautiful – but the experience of sardined humans is not. There is a stunning, double-sided staircase leading to the next floor up but the sheer crush of people ascending and descending meant it was almost impossible to use. It was jammed solid.
Livraria Lello draws about 3500 visitors daily, generating up to €28,000 in ticket sales alone. Photo / 123rf
This, mind you, was hardly peak time. What it must be like in the height of summer is not worth thinking about. Our travels were carefully scheduled for September-October-November to avoid the summer hordes and it remains the best way to see Europe. Climate change – huge issue though it is – means the weather can be most un-autumn-like and so it has been for us, with only three-four days of rain in three months.
But sometimes, like at Livraria Lello, there is no escape from overtourism. To get in, you first must book online. You can’t just turn up. Our tickets cost €8 each ($14). There is also a €16 “gold” ticket, though there was little golden about this experience. The crush of human beings overrode all else.
Livraria Lello’s fame rocketed with the advent of the Harry Potter books and movies. Creator JK Rowling lived in Porto for a couple of years (she taught English as a foreign language) and it was said Livraria Lello inspired her to create the shape, form and atmosphere of Hogwarts.
Who knows where that came from? It’s nonsense; Rowling has since denied any connection with Livraria Lello – saying she never went there and hadn’t even known it existed when she lived there.
However, such a contention (you can still find multiple references to Rowling and Harry Potter online) is marketing gold. So much so, that the bookstore seems to have ceased to be a bookstore and is now a huge tourist destination … and trap.
Your €8 ticket can be deducted from the price of a book so, after giving up on the gridlocked staircase, I swam through the crowd to the English section, feeling like one of those salmon heading upriver to spawn and having to leap up waterfalls and rapids.
I found a book from a favourite author – but it cost nearly €40 ($70). I gave up at that point, reflecting that here was a perfect example of overtourism and greed. The beauty that everyone comes to see – and the beauty inherent in books – is being overtaken by hunger for money, potentially destroying what made it desirable in the first place.
The Ribeira in Porto offers stunning views across the Douro River to port lodges. Photo / 123rf
About 3500 people per day visit Livraria Lello. If they all bought €8 tickets, that’s €28,000 a day ($50,000). You’d have to sell a lot of books to match that. All that is needed is to reduce the numbers and make entering the bookstore a desirable experience – and not just an Instagram photo.
Overtourism is unlikely to go away, even with various measures being taken against it in pressure spots around the world. However, in Italy the remarkable achievement that is the revealing of ancient Roman life in the village of Pompeii, buried by a Mt Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD and beautifully excavated, is showing the way.
In a space very much bigger than Livraria Lello, they are reducing the daily count of visitors to 20,000 per day and are instituting an online booking system (no walk-ups). At its peak, Pompeii has seen 36,000 visitors in a single day and the resultant crush and damage to parts of the site prompted the change.
Pompeii, another tourist hotspot, is reducing visitors to 20,000 daily to protect its heritage. Photo / 123rf
At its worst, overtourism can cause congestion (transport and accommodation), pollution, ecological damage and can price locals out of their own housing market (Barcelona, Venice, Rome, Bali, to name a few).
Porto, Livraria Lello’s home, is stunning but can also suffer from an excess of tourists – and has banned any more new, short-term leasing of homes there. It’s still well worth doing; we stayed on the Ribeira (the riverside promenade which looks across the Douro River to Vila Nova de Gaia, home to the big Portuguese port lodges like Sandeman, Grahams, Taylors and the like).
Porto has enough space and enough different quarters to escape the crowds on the Ribeira – but Livraria Lello remains an example of what tourism should not be and should not do to a thing of beauty.
Paul Lewis and Jennie.
Paul Lewis and Jennie Brockie have been driving across Europe (Italy, France, Spain and Portugal) for the past three months, offering some advice on the best way to do so.
