At some point in the decade that has just ended, an American producer HBO came up with the idea that a corner of the Basque coast called Gaztelugatxe, between Bakio and Bermeo, was going to be a perfect place to shoot some passages from the famous Game of Thrones series. In autumn 2016, for several days, the cameras, actors and other paraphernalisms that occur in that small islet of Bizkaia and its surroundings, multiplied Gaztelugatxe’s fame and spread throughout the world, even more after the première of the passages there recorded in 2017.

What happened next is not so romantic. Several Basque organizations (Basque Government, Provincial Council of Bizkaia…) had been pushing tourists to San Juan de Gaztelugatxe for years, and the Game of Thrones shoot gave a boost to that idea, but the thing overflowed. Now, the small island and its hermitage at the top are the second most visited area in Bizkaia, after the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and it has become apparent that the area is not properly prepared to accommodate the huge influx of visitors that has generated the unexpected reputation.

Some data: According to data from the Provincial Council of Bizkaia, 384,583 people visited San Juan de Gaztelugatxe during the summer of 2019, an increase of 15% over the same period of the previous year. By far, the month in which most visitors arrived was August: 154.794. And in a single day, on August 15, 6,434 people stood on the way down to the island and on the 241 stairs that climb to the hermitage in honor of Doniene. We have not used the word “accumulate” in vain: some images are very significant here and there - not only that day, of course - that are not shown in tourist attraction leaflets, taken at times when people barely fit on the shores of Gaztelugatxe.

The Chaos is also seen
above, on the road to San Juan de Gaztelugatxe. Most visitors travel by private car, so it is not easy to find a parking spot. In the days of the greatest influx, many cars are out of place, on the edge of the road, putting safety at risk. Something had to be done, and the Provincial Council of Bizkaia took the lead. In this context, on 25 November last, the MEP for Sustainability and the Natural Environment, Elena Unzueta, and Imanol Pradales, responsible for Infrastructure and Territorial Development in the same entity, announced a package of measures, some of which are already implemented. As they explained, the Council will spend 2.7 million euros until 2024 to “organize and improve the visits and tickets of San Juan de Gaztelugatxe”.

Following Pradales and Unzueta’s statements to the press of the Deputy’s intentions, the SOS platform Gaztelugatxe had been working for several weeks. The group was set up with a specific objective: Paralysis of the 51 seater parking project that the Provincial Council intends to build in the area known as Urizarreta. “We created the platform in mid-October, as soon as the project was published in the Official Gaztelugatxe Gorka Lopategi and Ana Urrutia Newsletter,” said SOS members Gaztelugatxe Gorka Lopategi and Ana Urrutia, “and first of all we started collecting signatures through the web change.org to ask the Deputy General of Bizkaia Ungati When it comes to writing these words, they have already obtained more than 100,000 signatures in favour of their claim.

In the presentation in November, Sustainability Deputy Elena Unzueta highlighted one idea: “We’re not doing thousands of car parks for the summer months, we’ll do it as little as possible.” Unzueta spoke of taking advantage of the “opportunity” of the arrival of thousands of visitors to San Juan de Gaztelugatxe, but “from respect to the environment and to the local visitors”. He added that the priority to use the parking lots to be built in the near future will be for buses, “because we intend to make public transport the main one, but that transition is not made from morning to night.” In this regard, the Infrastructure Deputy, Imanol Pradales, pointed out that once the new Urizarreta parking is built, another of the smaller car parks in the area, with capacity for 30 vehicles, will be reserved for buses and bicycles.

For SOS Gaztelugatxe, however, the path taken by the Council is not the most appropriate way to protect the area. Although the new parking lot has few places, it should be remembered that the private parking of the restaurant located in the area can involve 370 cars, the members of the platform say that its construction will have a very negative impact. “They want to do it in a very uneven place,” explains Ana Urrutia, “and it’s a long and complex job.” Also expensive, they added: Around EUR 920,000. “Each parking space will cost approximately 20,000 euros at the expense of the public treasury,” you can read in the informative pages provided by SOS Gaztelugatxe, “a barbarity!”.

“The environment where the parking is intended to be built is so abrupt that they must excavate on their hillside and then fill 9,500 cubic meters of stone,” said Urrutia, “because the area is unstable, they must build a wall of fifteen meters high for its sustenance, whose impact on the landscape will be enormous, as in the construction of five or six floors.” SOS Gaztelugatxe members want to make it clear that they are not against tourism, “but we need another tourism, greener, more sustainable, so as not to further degrade the environment.”

The environmental value of
San Juan de Gaztelugatxe is not only linked to the landscape, but also converged in it several figures seeking the conservation of nature. “Due to its natural prosperity, landscape richness and fragility, Gaztelugatxe was declared a protected biotope in 1998,” explains the website of the Provincial Council of Bizkaia. The full text will be found immediately: on the main page of the website is the link to the information about Gaztelugatxe, at the same level of the budgets for 2020 and the public job offers, for example, if in the field of tourism there was any doubt about what the girl in the eyes of the authorities of Bizkaia…

But let's go back to the biotope. Three years before the digital effects of Games of Thrones filled the Gaztelugatxe sky with dragons in 2013, it was integrated into the Natura 2000 Network for the protection of biodiversity, so the environment has two figures within that network: a special conservation area (ZEC) and a special protection zone for birds (ZEPA).

“An argument
in favour of parking, which the Representative repeats often, is that the works will be carried out outside the biotope,” said Ana Urrutia and Gorka Lopategi. In their view, however, common sense shows that this argument is null and void: “It’s not a biotope, but it’s very close, how won’t it affect?” The Bakio City Hall, in the allegations it submitted to the project a few weeks ago, pointed out precisely the distances: The car park they intend to build at Urizar is 190 meters from the BBE limit of Gaztelugatxe and 370 meters from the ZEC. “Although not within the Protected Spaces, the field [where the work is going to be carried out] has a great value as a connection with other units of the landscape,” the City Council states in its allegations.

Bakio City Hall argues that the realization of a construction site of this size so close to these areas, which is expected to last about a year, starting in the last quarter of 2020, will have various impacts for the species of the area. Among other things, the lack of quality of the habitats of the European mink and of the pilgrim hawk at risk, as well as the paralysis of the expansion of some indigenous trees living with pines.

At a hearing in November, Mr Imanol Pradales stressed that the land on which the parking will be built is already artificialized, as in 2009 the rubble was removed when the variant between Bakio and Bermeo was built. “It’s another argument used by the Diputación,” says Ana Urrutia, “and it’s not true, because in recent years the forest has been recovered, planting native trees.” In general, SOS Gaztelugatxe denounces that the parking project has been raised without properly measuring the impact it will produce on the environment and without justifying its need.

In the extensive list of claims submitted by the City of
Bakio to the Urizarreta parking project, in which the competence of the Provincial Council is questioned, the former have a legal nature and, in essence, question whether the Provincial Council of Bizkaia is competent to launch such a project. According to the arguments provided by the City Hall, the parking, if built, would be subject to a municipal road, so the project should comply with the regulations of Bakio. This regulation, by the way, prohibits the construction of a parking lot in the area.

The Diputación does not agree and Mr. Imanol Pradales has pointed out that the ownership of the area in which the parking is planned corresponds to the foral institution, “since in its day it was used for the demolition of the leftover materials of the variant of Batrailers-Bermeo”.

On the contrary, the claims of the Bakio City Council deny that this is the case: “The action planned now is totally different from what was built ten years ago on the BI-3101 road.” The text reproaches the Member who intends to combine the two works in order to justify the parking lot of Urizarreta.

What is the most direct way to reach Gaztelugatxe?As stated above,
the platform wants to promote “other mobility models” to reach Gaztelugatxe. “In the days of a large influx of visitors there are about 200 cars unlawfully parked in the ditch,” they say, “What is parking going to fix 51?” In their opinion, tourists should be taught that it is best to leave the car away, in the village, “and tell them that we have fantastic routes to go on foot or by bike.”

They also require a bus service appropriate for both the connection between Bermeo and Bakio and for the departure of both to Gaztelugatxe (distance is 4 kilometers from Bakio and 2 from Bermeo). “It’s Game of Thrones that made it all the way upside down, but before that we were ten years increasing the number of visitors, and still, in nine months of the year – not especially summer ones – there are no buses on weekends between Bakio and Bermeo, and very little on weekdays,” says Gorka Lopategi, member of SOS Gaztelugatxe.

The Provincial Council of Bizkaia has announced its intention to promote public transport to reach Gaztelugatxe through the measures announced, a message that the users of the platform have received with scepticism. Among others, they consider that the construction of a parking lot in Urizarreta will cause an effect called: “Making more parking spaces will attract more cars, which will exacerbate the problem, instead of solving it.”

SOS Gaztelugatxe accuses the Deputy of being in contradiction with the messages it disseminates about sustainability and the climate emergency. In particular, they want to highlight a fragment of the Foral Order of the Sustainability Department, issued on August 2, which formulates the environmental impact statement of the Urizarreta parking project. The document signed by Mrs Elena Unzueta states that the project “has no significant effects on the environment”, but in the red paragraph of SOS Gaztelugatxe states that: “(…) the creation of new parking infrastructures, although not having a major impact on the ground, maintains a strategy that does not reduce the use of the private vehicle, with the overall negative environmental effects that this entails”. Time will show the use given to the new parking, but for the moment those at SOS Gaztelugatxe suspect that the Diputación has shown “the obligation” to prioritize collective transportation in the future.

The Gaztelugatxe Gate, the
Bakio City Hall, has also put the debate on the table, and not only that: He has taken advantage of the allegations made to the Provincial Council’s parking project to present a new way of organizing accesses to Gaztelugatxe (since the allegation document has been entitled Dugu Alternatiba). “Today, in the traffic signs around Bizkaia, Gaztelugatxe is read long before arriving at it, visitors coming from outside are heading straight there,” says Bakio Mayor Amets Jauregizar (EH Bildu), “and we believe that the visit to Gaztelugatxe has to start in Bakio or Bermeo.”

In the Gaztelugatxe environment there is no significant increase in the number of parking spaces “with an economic cost and an assumed environmental impact”, the Bakio City Hall states in its report of allegations. “Due to the tourist attraction of the area, any increase will be lower than the demand in peak tourist times, especially in summer and Easter.” In view of this situation, the City Council has proposed that in periods of great influx of visitors private vehicles should be directed to the surrounding villages. That is to say, there would be a space to start the visit: Gaztelugatxe doors.

These areas would not be a mere parking lot, but a reception point and departure from other access roads to Gaztelugatxe. In addition to reporting the area, visitors will be invited to come by foot, by bicycle or by bus. To this end, it would be necessary, inter alia, to set up an appropriate bus service with sufficient frequency. As for the bicycle, it is not the best option for its orography today, so the Bakio City Hall understands that you should look for the right roads and condition the road.

No one would be barred from driving to the area of San Juan de Gaztelugatxe, but taking into account that it is better to go by bus or by foot than to use your own vehicle. To this end, the Bakio City Hall proposes to organize a parking fee system.

Is there room for everyone?
In any case, AMETS Jauregizar, mayor of Bakio, believes that the flow of visitors to Gaztelugatxe should be managed jointly by all the institutions involved: “We call for the setting up of a table for decision-making between all (Bakio City Hall, Bermeo City Hall, Provincial Council, Basque Government…) and citizenship must also play an important role in this. The objective of our proposal is not the confrontation with the Provincial Council of Bizkaia, but the collaboration”.

In the words of Jauregizar, the institutions must take two important decisions for the proper management of the Gaztelugatxe environment from the point of view of tourism and mobility. “One, who will manage the buses that run through the towns; Deputies, Municipalities, all together…”. The second decision is more profound, not to say that it is at the heart of the problem: “We must sit together and establish Gaztelugatxe’s hosting capacity.” In short, how many people can Gaztelugatxe receive every day? “Based on this, we will have to think about what infrastructure to build and what services to organize, but not before.”

The mayor of Bakio explained that reception capacity is a technical concept that serves, among other things, to establish the number of people who can access natural parks; “We make a proposal to discuss this concept at a political level.” In the same vein, the members of the SOS Gaztelugatxe platform are of the opinion, but they believe that the Provincial Council of Bizkaia will hardly resort to this mechanism. “They are afraid to limit the number of visitors,” says Ana Urrutia, “but if we really want to preserve the environment, we have to do so, there are many examples in the world and they are examples of sites well managed from the tourism point of view.”