UK firm plans vast resort on fragile coast in Greece

John Vidal, The Guardian 5 Mar 08;

A British property development company is planning five exclusive holiday villages, a string of "super luxury" hotels, three golf courses and a marina in one of the most remote and ecologically fragile areas of Greece.

The 7,000-bed development planned by Minoan Group on 10 square miles of the arid, windswept Sidero peninsula of north-eastern Crete would be one of the largest tourist developments in the Mediterranean. The £800m project is strongly backed by the Greek government, and the local monastery that owns the land.

But last night, international ecologists and archaeologists said the holiday development would do "immense and permanent damage to a part of Crete which is of European significance".

Dr Oliver Rackham, professor of historical ecology and master of Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University, who has written a book on the making of the Cretan landscape, said: "The development is grotesquely unsuited to the environment of this part of Greece. This is one of the most arid places in Europe. The development is unsustainable because of the huge amounts of water that will be needed.

"The developers propose desalination, but a large desalination factory will do further damage to the ecosystem: it will either cover a great area of land with solar collectors or will demand a large supply of energy, which is scarce in Greece."

The scheme, called Cave Sdero, was also condemned by Bartholomew 1, the Patriarch of the Orthodox church, who is a figurehead of the global environment movement. The patriarchy has long disputed jurisdiction with the Church of Greece over the monastery which owns the land where the development is planned.

"It will be a monster. We are very worried and have received complaints, but it does not come under our jurisdiction," said a spokeswoman for Bartholomew.

The company last night said its £2m environmental impact survey showed that any damage would be minimal.

"We will be building on less than 1% of the land," said Minoan's chairman, Christopher Egleton. "It will be the first fully sustainable tourist development. The intention is to be carbon neutral. The local community will benefit very significantly."

The project is backed by Forum for the Future, one of Britain's leading green thinktanks, which was set up by the government's sustainable development commissioner, Sir Jonathon Porritt.

"We have been there. It's a beautiful place," said Stephanie Draper, of the Forum, which accepts £10,000 a year from Minoan as a partner organisation. "This is an opportunity to get tourism right, provide jobs, and show you can have sustainable tourism. There is no investment in the area and at the moment the land is overgrazed.

"The company plans to build a desalination plant and the golf courses will be planted with salt-tolerant grass, and with local flora instead of grasses that require a lot of water."

But Rackham and others are not convinced by claims of sustainability.

"Here is an entire landscape of ancient terraces, fields, and check-dams," he said. "As nowhere else except on a few remote islets, one can see what the farmed countryside of Mediterranean antiquity looked. The whole peninsula ... is an archaeological site, with great potential for interpretation, and deserves to be protected as such."

Jennifer Moody, a researcher in the classics department of the University of Texas, said: "As far as we know there has been no archaeological impact assessment. The remains are delicate and will not survive building and earth-moving."

EcoCrete, a network of Cretan environmental organisations, said it had written to 11 ministries to try to stop the scheme to no avail.

"We have been very worried about the scale of the project," it said.