The rubbish situation in Corfu is about to impact this summers tourist trade and therefore the income for the whole island....

Corfu in Crisis #corfuincrisis  

Dear Mr. Tsipras,

I have just read your speech during the 26th General Assembly of the Greek Tourism Federation and with all due respect I think you need to make an appointment as soon as possible to get your eyes tested as I am concerned you seem to have become blind……

The reason for my concern is that you must have deteriorated very quickly to not be able to see what is happening on the island of Corfu [Kerkyra]. I am not Greek by birth, but this incredible place has been mine and my husband’s home for more than half of our lives and is the only home our son has known. So yes, we have seen some changes since our arrival, some good some bad and now one downright appalling episode. I am of course talking about the current rubbish problem here. As we are so passionate about Corfu, we started a small holiday company to give people more “individual” holidays away from the package holidays and help them to see the island as we do and hopefully have a good time so they either return themselves or suggest it to others. As an honest person I am now thinking that I need to close my site and to get in touch with all those who have booked and ask if they would prefer to cancel as how can I bring people here to see and smell the rubbish?

One of your points is to promote Greece as a film destination – Corfu is already one as it has had the incredible luck of being featured in the TV series based on the famous books by Gerald Durrell, written about his life here – the island looks fantastic in the series and filming for series 4 is due to start again in September. I imagine it will be quite hard to add to the story line a reason for the actors all wearing gas masks. This series alone is one of the reasons the island is so popular at the moment. So imagine flocks of tourists coming to find the magical island of the series only to find islands of rubbish…… and the smell ….oh the smell …. As I write this to you I sit in our apartment which is a good 200 meters from our local car park and I can smell the mounds of rubbish that currently fill that car park. Would you like us to bring you a lorry load and leave it outside your front door?

Now we are luckier than most as we have a piece of land that we bought to build on – which with the new taxes we will never be able to manage but that is for another letter another day – so we can go and bury our degradable rubbish, our food scraps – but most people cannot and yet they were asked to keep such rubbish in their homes. I mean seriously with the heat already this summer one bag smells like a rotting corpse within hours… how can this be a solution?

Apparently a local newspaper reported that you think we should sort it ourselves –

There was intense discussion at the mini cabinet meeting about the issue of waste disposal. As the mayor said, “The central government consider that we should get real and solve our problem ourselves. They don’t want to even discuss the transportation of waste elsewhere and couldn’t understand the local SYRIZA statements that this was what the central government wanted and that the costs would be paid from the state coffers……..

The rubbish dumps here were made in the years when the island was firstly less populated and secondly had nowhere near the amount of tourists it does today and so cannot cope – yet when we go to the mainland we see HUGE areas without any habitation anywhere near that could be used for recycling plants and refuse facilities, without bothering anyone near.

 

Now this whole thing is not a new problem and in 2008 caused the death of one Greek soul – SURELY THAT ALONE should be enough to make sure that no one else should die because of rubbish! Yet already we have people rioting and protesting again – what else can they do?

 Here is the report about that incident in case no one has let you know -

https://libcom.org/news/one-dead-protester-after-barricades-against-open-garbage-dump-south-corfu-end-clashes-with

So if I cancel my bookings and close my little company and therefore have no income and no money for the winter, how would you have me and 99% of the local people who rely on the tourism business feed our families? Pay our mortgages? And basically just generally live????????……

So please do let me know how you get on at the ophthalmologist and please make sure he does not issue you with any “rose tinted” glasses [an English expression for when you only see what you want to see] – you need to be able to see clearly!!,

Yours sincerely

Mrs SJ Monro

I would have attached some photos I took yesterday and today as apparently when some politicians recently visited the island they cleared out the bins they would be passing so just thought you might like to see how pretty it is…….…..Also when you do get your new glasses do check out the amazing work of @plasticfreegreece #plasticfreegreece ….