White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

  • Home
  • King’s Commentaries
  • Random Features
  • Photos
  • Public Speaker
  • WHC Episodes
  • About WHC
  • Carrying Stations
  • ME/CFS Alert
  • Contact Us

Sorry, Europe Is Full, Tourists Are Told

August 9, 2025 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

This was the summer when much of Europe said to the ever-increasing flow of tourists, “Sorry, we are full.”
Of course, Europe isn’t full at all. It is just those places that we all want to go, that have been tugging at our imaginations since we began imagining, are hopelessly crowded — and some are brutally hot as well.
The most overcrowded getaways are in southern Europe: Nice, in the legendary South of France; Barcelona, Spain; Italian coastal towns, especially Venice; the best-known Greek islands such as Mykonos, Hydra and Santorini. Along the Croatian coast, Dubrovnik and Split are crowded.
What is ugly outside and delightful inside? Answer: a cruise ship.
The sight of those multitiered behemoths squeezing into a port that was designed for something a lot more gainly reminds me of someone struggling into clothes they have far outgrown. It can be done, but it isn’t pretty.
You can’t blame everything on cruise ships. They aren’t to blame for the summer traffic jams in Britain’s Lake District or around the Cotswolds. They aren’t the reason you can’t get into the great museums of Europe in summer, such as the Louvre in Paris or the Churchill War Rooms in London.
But cruise ships have become a particular problem for much of coastal Europe and aren’t the kind of tourism locals want.
The Greek tourism minister, Olga Kefalogianni, explained it to me when I interviewed her a few years ago. She said that the cruise ships dump a lot of people who don’t spend enough time (i.e., money) ashore. They disembark a veritable army who take tours and are back on board for supper. The ships tend to sail at night to avoid overnight docking fees, and the locals get very little economic gain from the thousands upon thousands who arrive every summer.
She told me Greece was trying to get more of the restocking contracts and to have more of the ships homeport in the country.
For tourists, in general, she said: Avoid the famous sights, such as the Acropolis in Athens, in summer and try to visit in the spring and fall.
She said for Greece, where tourism is especially important, it is a delicate matter, urging tourists to go to the less-visited northern areas of the country.
A couple of summers ago, I was in Santorini when five cruise ships arrived simultaneously. It was ugly. There is a cable railway to get up to the pretty town of Fira, and it meant waiting — and fuming and cursing all of the other cruise ships.
A friend said he had to ride down from the cliffside town on a donkey in order to make his ship’s departure.
There are questions about cruising. Many of them involve a kind of travel snobbery. Some seemingly well-traveled people reject cruising. “I wouldn’t want to be stuck with all those people. Never,” a friend told me.
A large cruise ship with nearly 6,000 passengers and a crew of about 2,000 is, well, just about the size of many of the largest hotels. New York’s Waldorf Astoria had 1,400 rooms from the time of its construction in 1931 until it was gutted and rebuilt recently — and the number of rooms was greatly reduced. The largest hotels in Las Vegas, the Mirage and the Venetian, are the size of the largest ships.
The problem isn’t with the number of your fellow cruisers, but with the destination ports: The cruise ships have worn out their welcome in some places, not others.
My wife and I were hostile to cruising until we did it. That was in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea in the early 1990s and we saw places — such as Yalta, Odessa and Constantia — that we maybe wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
So, we formed a pattern of using cruising for exploration rather than sightseeing. We went through the Panama Canal when it came back into the news because we wanted to see it and know what it was like. We went around Cape Horn, seeing one of the ends-of-the-earth places, where so many mariners have died, from the comfort of a luxury liner.
That is bucket list-stuff, and I want more of it.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: cruise ships, Europe, France, Greece, Greek, hot, Italian, Mediterranean, Mykonos, Santorini, Spain, Tourists

Postcard from A Coruña: A Summit in a Spanish City in Ascendency

August 21, 2024 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

I am one of those who believes what Seneca, the ancient Roman writer and statesman, said, “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.”

I don’t know if the stoic Seneca said that before or after his exile to the island of Corsica by the emperor Claudius.

Anyway, earlier this summer, my husband and I had the opportunity to visit a city in the country where Seneca was born: Spain. Both the city and the purpose of our trip imparted a new vigor to our minds.

We were invited to participate in the Ecosystems 2030 (ES2030) summit, held in A Coruña, a port city on a promontory in the Galicia region of northwest Spain, from June 26-29. The summit is the creation of a man with a vigorous mind: Omar Hatamleh, the head of AI at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the executive chairman of ES2030.

The annual summits in Spain — where Hatamleh lived and studied — gather speakers and participants from a wide swathe of professions, connecting the unconnected and spurring ideas. His stated aim for summiteers is for them to ditch linear thinking and “to successfully embrace disruption, transform your organization, and thrive over the next decade.” Hatamleh has used the same formula — cross-industry innovation — for meetings he has organized at NASA.

The agenda for this year’s summit, the fourth of 10, was “Women in Leadership.” And the women who addressed the summit were wonder women from private and public entities including Pilar Manchon, Google; Aylin Uysal, Oracle; Rika Nakazawa, NTT; JoAnn Stonier, Mastercard; Maria Fernandez, Sony Music Entertainment; Deepti Pahwa, an innovation and leadership coach to C-suites and entrepreneurs; Nancy Namrouqa, Jordanian minister of state for legal affairs; and Jennifer Stumm, a concert violist and founder and director of Illumina, a Sao Paulo-based music collective, festival and social group “working for greater equity and goodwill in classical music by young musicians around the world without access to private instruction or mentorship.”

In formal addresses and in conversations at lunches, dinners and in hotel lounges, these women shared their thoughts about new ventures and innovation in the AI age, the future of AI governance, e-commerce, privacy and social media, and even board member leadership. Their talk was of how they are shaping new frontiers not how they shattered barriers in the private and public sectors —refreshing and inspiring.

The summit was a movable feast, convening mostly at the avant-garde Palexco Conference Center, which is located at the city’s port and has a roof that resembles the wings of a giant seabird, the mayor’s office in the neoclassical-style City Hall, built in the early 20th century, and the two-Michelin-starred Pepe Vieira Restaurante & Hotel.

The restaurant and hotel, part of the Relais & Chateaux group, is located “in the upper area of Raxo, the smallest municipality of the municipality of Poio, in Pontevedra,” according to directions on its website.

It was an experience getting to the restaurant, which is about an hour-and-a-half drive from A Coruña through a sea of Galician vineyards and villages where the backyard of every house had wine grape vines. No grape escape.

The website says, “For a better experience in finding ‘the last kitchen in the world,’ follow our instructions, since Google has already gotten lost several times along the way.” That is truth in advising.

Pepe Vieira is located on a terraced hill overlooking the Pontevedra estuary. It is surrounded by woods, au naturel landscaping and “biodynamic” vegetable gardens, enjoyed on the patio or inside the dining room which has huge, picture windows.

Chef Vieira prepares dishes, combining “ancestral local produce, rediscovered through research with historians, scientists and anthropologists” with ingredients from afar. He prepared a variety of small dishes for us, including hake with Albariño lees, tapioca pearls and sorrel oil. His decision to locate the restaurant far from city pollution and his combination of gastronomy and sustainable gardening earned him a Michelin Green Star.

A Coruña is far from the anti-tourism protests in Madrid and Barcelona. While it is one of the chief ports of northern Spain, the country’s second-largest fishing center and has a shipyard for building fishing vessels, it also has a significant real-estate market for vacation homes — and welcomes tourists.

Cruise ships stop there and disgorge passengers who visit the Old Town and the New Town; the city’s churches, from medieval to modern; and notable landmarks, including the Roman Tower of Hercules, an imposing, square-shaped lighthouse dating from the reign of Trajan (98-117 AD). A characteristic feature of the houses is their window balconies, glazed for the Atlantic gales, giving A Coruña the name “Crystal City.”

Spaniards from the south come to this Galician city in the summer for the cool wind and the surf. As with many cities on Spain’s Atlantic coast, A Coruña is a surfer spot — with a bronze statue of two surfer dudes riding the waves in a fountain on a seafront avenue.

Photo Credit: Linda Gasparello

A Coruña has been discovered by the foodies, who have long flocked to San Sebastián, also on the Atlantic coast, close to the border with France. On the last night of Ecosystems 2030, the summiteers dined on some of the tastiest octopus in the city at Pulperia de Melide. The Galician dish of octopus sprinkled with paprika is a favorite of mine.

Seneca insisted on eating moderately, not indulging in luxuries or delicacies. He wrote,“Our aim is to live in accordance with nature, is it not?”

I don’t know if Seneca traveled to A Coruña, called Brigantium under the Romans. But I can imagine him being a happy stoic there.

Filed Under: Gasparello's Articles Tagged With: A Coruña, AI, Artificial intelligence, Ecosystems 2030, Galicia, Google, Illumina, Mastercard, NASA, NTT, Omar Hatamleh, Oracle, Palexco Conference Center, Pepe Vieira Restaurante & Hotel, Sony Music Entertainment, Spain

White House Chronicle on Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
The Case for Prescribed Burning: Fighting Fire With Fire

The Case for Prescribed Burning: Fighting Fire With Fire

Llewellyn King

Wildfire takes no prisoners, has no mercy, knows no boundaries, respects no nation and is a clear and present danger this and every summer as summers grow drier and hotter. The American West is burning; across Canada there are wildfires; and swaths of France, Spain, Portugal and Greece are ablaze. In 2022, faraway Siberia was […]

Will AI Stimulate Shadow Government?

Will AI Stimulate Shadow Government?

Llewellyn King

“This Time It’s Different” is the title of a book by Omar Hatamleh on the impact of artificial intelligence on everything. Hatamleh, who is NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s chief artificial intelligence officer, means that we shouldn’t look to previous technological revolutions to understand the scope and the totality of the AI revolution. It is, […]

Sorry, Europe Is Full, Tourists Are Told

Sorry, Europe Is Full, Tourists Are Told

Llewellyn King

This was the summer when much of Europe said to the ever-increasing flow of tourists, “Sorry, we are full.” Of course, Europe isn’t full at all. It is just those places that we all want to go, that have been tugging at our imaginations since we began imagining, are hopelessly crowded — and some are […]

Trump Hostility To Wind And Solar Has Utilities Treading Softly

Trump Hostility To Wind And Solar Has Utilities Treading Softly

Llewellyn King

This commentary was originally published in Forbes. President Donald Trump reiterated his hostility to wind generation when he arrived in Scotland for what was ostensibly a private visit. “Stop the windmills,” he said. But the world isn’t stopping its windmill development and neither is the United States, although it has become more difficult and has […]

Copyright © 2025 · White House Chronicle Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in