Gozo’s death throes

Identity is regarded as a complex phenomenon and incorporates two primary perspectives: sociocultural and spatial.

I would say that key factors affecting the identity of Malta’s sister island include tourism development and a post-war history connected with significant migration processes.

In consequence, the relationships between tourism and identity must definitely be emphasised. Coupled with those, one necessarily has to analyse the consequences of the construction and development industry that has been booming for a good number of years now on this minuscule rock and that, in its wake, has been drastically and rapidly changing the natural landscape of what was once an idyllic Gozo.

Gozo risks losing its natural charms. Photo: viewingmalta.com

Once a most appealing destination, Gozo has become most prone to tourism overkill. Tourism is a phenomenon that can cook your food or burn your house down.

In other words, we all risk destroying Gozo as the very place that we love the most. Gozo used to symbolise vacation time.

Its very insularity used to make it more attractive than a comparable piece of real estate on Malta’s mainland. It was a world unto itself, with its own traditions, ecosystem, culture and landscape.

That is what used to attract us. But, as a microworld, Gozo is now also more vulnerable to population pressure, climate change, storm damage, invasive species and, now, tourism overkill.

With the increasing intensity of an invasion by money-minded construction magnates, Gozo has become smaller, less green and nowhere anymore quiet with a laid-back atmosphere.

Way back in October 1999, the late Mario Tabone, writing in The Gozo Observer, had already warned that if Gozo is allowed to develop haphazardly, according to off-the-cuff decisions and ephemeral contingencies, it would end up, in a generation, losing the character of its landscape and its social fabric.

It is already late in the day.

In no way do I want to sound fatalistic or some doomsday prophet but, at the rate we are going and at the rate we are procrastinating on taking action to, at least, retain some of the natural charms of Gozo, it will not be long before it will simply remain a forlorn piece of paradise imprinted in our memory.

MARK SAID – Msida