Officials defending the right to openly flout the law
The fight against businesses’ illegal occupation of public beaches continues, but inspections have drawn the ire of some local mayors and MPs.
A team of inspectors from the Public Property Authority in the regional unit of Magnisia, in Thessaly, imposed numerous fines on businesses that had extended their activity to public beaches without a permit and shut down five of them, including a seafood restaurant that had built a pier jutting into the sea, which authorities had deemed illegal since 2019.
The mayor of Volos, Achilleas Beos, called the inspections an “extreme act.” “We remain the country of exaggeration, swinging from one extreme to the other, always for PR reasons and aiming to create a temporary, irrelevant impression,” he posted on social media.
“What next? The ‘Beach Towel Party’ entering Parliament?” he added, sarcastically referring to the Citizens’ Movement for Free Beaches that first appeared on the island of Paros, which claimed the people’s right to use beaches for free instead of paying often exorbitant sums for recliners and umbrellas set up by private businesses, with or without permit.
Local SYRIZA MP Alexandros Meikopoulos also came out in support of the offending businesses, with a parliamentary question. Invoking the destruction wrought throughout Thessaly by a storm early last September, he essentially accused authorities of undermining the locals’ well-being. “The catering and tourism professionals are aware that soon the Property Authority will extend its inspections throughout the beaches and that, as a result their (business) activity will be significantly hurt at the peak of the summer season.”
Such support cuts across all parties. Last summer, MPs from the Dodecanese multi-seat constituency said that illegally operating beach bars in Rhodes should be left alone because the island had been ravaged by wildfires.
On Wednesday, the Umbrella Network for the Defense of Open Spaces fingered four businesses in Rhodes for gross violations of their lease terms and demanded that authorities boost inspections. One, in the city of Rhodes itself, had leased 704 square meters of a public space, but its operation extends across 2,100 sq.m. Another, at Sunwing beach, with a permit for a canteen cart, operates a 300-square-meter beach bar. A third, having leased 330 square meters for 90 recliners, has deployed 250 over 1,600 square meters.
At least in one case in Rhodes, the excess recliners and umbrellas had been removed after an inspection, only to reappear a few days later.
