Tourists pay to enter the city… and they come by the thousands

Here you must pay to enter the city An idea that is all too well knownIt is not in Guanajuato, but yes, here you have to pay if you want to go into the place

It is a very tempting idea… the only difference is that it worked!!!!… in Italy

Civita di Bagnoregio, Italy/Gto News

In Civita di Bagnoregio citizens go all over and next to the medieval walls detecting visitors that go around the village. As the tourists get closer, they call out to the locals.

But this is not your ordinary tourist destination and locals are far from being ordinary.

They’re cats -a colony of some 20 felines- that comprise Civita’s main bloc of residents. The feline population is compared with only 12 human beings and if you think that’s a small number, well… until October 2019 there were only 10.

Civita is located at a tiny strip of land that comes up from the valley floor. It’s cut off from the nearest town, Bagnoregio, by a mini canyon. To reach Civita, visitors must cross a 366-meter pedestrian-only bridge, the place is just fit for your Instagram frames.

Civita was once called “la città che muore” or “the dying village”, it is the terrain of the “calanchi,” or badlands, where soft rock sits on a fragile stratum of sand and clay, there is erosion that sends entire portions of the village into the depths below.

And there came the idea

In 2013, the mayor of Bagnoregio, Francesco Bigiotti, had an idea and against the advice of his councilors he decided to charge visitors for crossing the bridge to enter the village.

It shouldn’t have worked.

Very rarely the idea of paying for entry somewhere appeals to visitors. But Bigiotti thought that asking people to pay to cross the bridge to Civita would make them want to visit even more. So he charged a “symbolic” cost of €1.50 (US$1.67).

It was a marketing stunt… and it worked, he said.

“When you pay for something, it becomes precious”, he notes.

‘Hit and run’ tourists

But it does not go smoothly and buses are not allowed in Bagnoregio, a small town of only 3,700 inhabitants, but cars are allowed through ancient Bagnoregio’s streets.

Those staying overnight can park at the foot of the bridge a 20-minute walk outside town.

But here comes the unwelcome ones. “It’s great economically”, says one of the residents; “But there are lots of ‘hit and run’ visitors”, ‘hit and run’ are the tourists that Italians call the daytrippers who come to take photos and just leave without contributing to the local economy.

Al of this is in Italy, fortunately.