Athens (AFP)
Greece will allow scuba diving on wrecks to attract more tourists, the Greek Minister of Tourism announced on Monday, whose country expects tourist income to increase by 10% this year.
"We will legislate on the creation of scuba diving parks. We will allow access to wrecks that are more than 50 years old and that were not previously authorized" to diving, announced the minister Harry Theocharis in an AFP interview.
A bill will be introduced "within a month" to open the wrecks of ships sunk between 1860 and 1970 to diving, he said.
He did not give more details but the Greek seabed is known to harbor many wrecks dating from the First and Second World Wars, including the Britannic, sistership of the Titanic, which sank in 1916 off the island of Kea.
Greece, emerging from a decade of financial crisis, is counting on tourism to accelerate economic growth and jobs. The tourism sector generates a quarter of the country's gross domestic product and employs 20% of the Greek workforce.
Tourism revenues increased by 12% in 2019, from 16 to 18.1 billion euros in one year, the minister announced Monday at a press conference.
Greece expects to see even more tourists in 2020. There were 31 million last year, an estimated number to increase by 5% this year.
The minister acknowledged "pressure on the infrastructure" of some attractive islands, stressing however that Greece "was far from the problems of (congestion) which other destinations were facing".
Together with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and other Greek ministers, Theocharis travels to Paris on Tuesday for an economic forum to attract investment to Greece.
© 2020 AFP