Luxurious yachts are seen docked off the coast of Mykonos close to Platys Gialos and Psarou seashores. The arrival of the super-rich to the Greek island introduced their followers, but additionally attracted prison components, one businessperson famous. [Shutterstock]
Whereas many Aegean islands are involved about their future improvement and identification as a result of strain of the true property market, overdevelopment and tourism, on Mykonos the zoning of vacationer villages continues unabated. A number of days in the past, one other potential funding was put out for session – this time at Agrari, with a lodge and villas. That is the fifth funding of its type to be launched on the Island of the Winds in only a few years.
The plan submitted for session by Spend money on Greece features a lodge unit with 82 beds, 12 furnished villas, a spa, swimming swimming pools and an indoor gymnasium (15,781 sq.m. constructed on an space of 193 hectares). The corporate selling the venture, Southrock Property Firm Eleven, is requesting that the venture be included within the strategic funding plan to be able to implement the funding as a Particular Spatial Growth Plan for Strategic Investments (ESHASE), an city umbrella, and to acquire fast-track approval.
‘Strategic investments… needs to be directed to areas with little tourism improvement, such because the islands of the northern Aegean’
Nevertheless, the general public reception to the plan was not very hot. Virtually all (68) of the feedback submitted had been adverse, with residents declaring that Agrari is likely one of the final unspoiled areas of a tourist-saturated island.
The overconcentration of strategic funding initiatives on Mykonos will not be solely a results of the island’s tourism success, but additionally, in a wierd manner, a consequence of the “effort” to curb the creation of recent vacationer services. A ban on the development of recent vacationer models within the unplanned space of the island was imposed in 2021, apart from these which might be promoted as strategic (ESHASE) or with a equally favorable city planning standing (particular city plans). “The constructing suspension imposed on the island, however excluding the sort of tourism funding, has had this impact: A few of these investments have been switched to the strategic funding mannequin (which isn’t notably demanding by way of the quantity of funding required anyway) as a manner of circumventing the suspension. It’s after all absurd to contemplate an funding on Mykonos as ‘strategic,’” says Efi Sarantakou, assistant professor of spatial coverage on the College of Western Attica.
“Strategic investments are usually not problematic in themselves, they’re a software utilized by many states to facilitate investments. But it surely shouldn’t be abused, and concrete and monetary incentives shouldn’t be given to overdeveloped vacationer locations. As a substitute, they need to be directed to areas with little tourism improvement, such because the islands of the northern Aegean. Or in areas the place there’s a important profit to society, corresponding to the entire regeneration of a touristically degraded space or deserted settlement.”
