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Easter Island

The massive growth of tourism in recent decades is putting increasing pressure on the world’s most spectacular areas, leading to calls for visitor numbers to be limited.

Heading the offensive are the residents of Easter Island, a tiny speck in the South Pacific which is technically part of Chile.

Famed for its huge and ancient stone statues, the locals have recently taken to camping out on the airport’s runway, in an attempt to reduce the 65,000 tourists the island gets annually.

However, despite warnings the statues are being irreversibly damaged, little is expected to change on the island, which is dependent on tourist dollars.

Elsewhere, the Galapagos Islands, famed for their huge number of endemic species and inspiring Darwin’s theory of evolution, are also deemed at risk.

The islands, off Ecuador, already limit visitor numbers, however the scale of tourism has still risen drastically in recent years, from 40,000 tourists a year to 170,000.

They have recently been added to a Unesco list of endangered World Heritage sites following the discovery of a new malaria-carrying mosquito brought in by tourists.

Some places are already considering drastic measures to try and protect their sites.

In Egypt, authorities are expected to soon completely close some of the biggest draw cards in the Valley of the Kings.

Tombs, such as those of Tutankhamun, would be closed and replaced with replicas, to protect the paintings and carvings from the damage caused by millions of tourists breathing on them.

Most extreme, however, is the plan of the city of Venice to ban entry to anybody without a hotel reservation.