A tourist tax of €1 per overnight stay is to be used to create a fund for the ‘sustainability of tourism and the environment’ by Loulé council.
The tax income will be used to cover the costs of replenishing sand on beaches along the Loulé council’s coastline as well as to repair damage caused by fires and floods.
Loulé's mayor, Vitor Aleixo, said that tourists would not notice the tax and that it could be decisive in responding to the consequences of climate change.
The tax will be introduced in 2019, according to the Socialist Party mayor of Loulé, who announced the tax at a climate change seminar in Vilamoura last Friday.
The mayor will spend 2018 studying how best to collect the tax, in readiness for its introduction in 2019, adding that he expects the tourist tax to be well received by businessmen involved in tourism and hospitality and that mayors have an important role to play in combating the effects of climate change.
Vítor Aleixo is the chairman of yet another talking shop, the Coordinating Council of the Network of Municipalities for Local Adaptation to Climate Change, which is made up of about 30 councils including Lagos and Odemira.
The Intermunicipal Community of the Algarve, the Algarve councils’ group, has approved a plan that brings together municipalities and public bodies at a regional and national level to tackling climate change in the southern region of the country but its mayors will not have expected Aleixo to break ranks over the thorny and much discussed issue of a tourist tax in the Algarve and to go it alone.
The Socialist mayor of Loulé's announcement torpedoes the Left Bloc’s proposal to install a regional tourist tax in the Algarve that would be used to pay the Via do Infante concession holder’s annual income, thus removing toll charges for drivers.
Vitor Aleixo can safely hide behind a sexy ‘climate change’ initiative while enabling the government to continue with tolls on the region’s motorway by now claiming that a tourist tax to cover the concession toll income costs would be inequitable as it will not come from every council in the region.
This Climate Change initiative already has funding of €470,000 from for the Operational Programme for Sustainability and Efficiency in the Use of Resources and no doubt will soak up more funds as it continues.
The Intermunicipal Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change "will be completed by the end of 2018 and brings together universities, mayors and public institutions, who will gather knowledge, ideas and proposals to combat situations, such as drought," according to its statement.
