The natural park, mainly due to Maya Bay, became the most lucrative in the country, reaching 1.9 million visitors in 2017, more than 80 percent of whom were foreigners, and revenues exceeding 669 million baht (19.89 million dollars or 18.24 million euros).
EFE
Phi Phi Leh, Thailand
Although with limited capacity and without being able to swim, tourists have enthusiastically returned to the famous Thai beach popularized by the Leonardo DiCaprio film "The Beach", after more than three years of closure due to environmental deterioration.
"Beautiful, the most beautiful place I've seen in Thailand," Facundo, an Argentine tourist, tells Efe, just before going down to the white sand beach and turquoise waters located on Phi Phi Leh Island, in southwest Thailand.
As in the famous scene from "The Beach" (2000), tourists descend to the sand amazed by the beauty of the landscape of tropical vegetation and hills that surround the beach in Maya Bay as if they were limestone giants.
"All we know is that a movie had been filmed there and we didn't know it was a nature reserve," explains Facundo, who says he doesn't mind not being able to swim in the bay if it's to protect the environment.
Natural park
Phi Phi Leh is one of the six islands of the Phi Phi archipelago, which is part of the Hat Noppharat Thara-Mu Ko Phi Phi nature park in the Andaman Sea and belongs to the province of Krabi.
The park is protected with the exception of Phi Phi Don, the largest island in the archipelago, which is home to several hundred hotels along its 9.73 kilometers.
The place was already a tourist destination 40 years ago, but the movie starring DiCaprio, based on the novel of the same name by Alex Garland, made that beach world famous and it became the main target of mass tourism in the country.
The natural park, mainly due to Maya Bay, became the most lucrative in the country, reaching 1.9 million visitors in 2017, more than 80 percent of whom were foreigners, and revenues exceeding 669 million baht (19.89 million dollars or 18.24 million euros).
However, the excess of tourists, boats and launches, partly from Phuket and Krabi, contributed to the deterioration of the environment, mainly in the paradisiacal Maya Bay, where up to 92 percent of the coral died.
An average of 5,000 people visited the famous beach daily, where queues formed like in a supermarket and boats and launches anchored in the bay without regard for the corals.
In 2018, authorities decided to close Maya Bay to the public to rehabilitate the marine environment and it reopened in January 2022, about three and a half years later.
The difference now is that only 375 people are allowed in at a time, for about an hour, and swimming in the bay is prohibited.
Slow recovery
"The coral has grown from 8 to 15 percent and continues to increase. Blacktip reef sharks have returned to the bay (...) Coral grows very slowly," Thon Thamrongnawasawat, a marine biologist at Kasetsart University in Bangkok and advisor to environmental authorities, explained to EFE.
"There are no shortcuts. It took us 20 years to close it (the bay) and now it will take us 10 or 15 years to return it to its state of 40 years ago," adds the expert, who considers the regulations to protect the bay sufficient, although he warns of the risk of warming due to the climate crisis.
Restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic have contributed to the improvement of the natural environment in Thailand by causing tourism to fall from 39.8 million visitors in 2019 to 420,000 in 2021, thus reducing its environmental impact.
At Phi Phi National Park, Covid-19 caused visitors to fall in 2021 to 239,841, 95 percent of them Thai, and revenues remained at 15 million baht (US$446,700 or €408,977), according to official data.
The gradual recovery of tourism means an increase in visitors to the archipelago, with dozens of boats and launches and hundreds of people snorkeling around Phi Phi Leh, except in the protected Maya Bay.
Even with the capacity limit, it is estimated that more than 4,000 tourists will visit the beach daily, which is similar to the average before the closure in 2018.
Chao Treenawongse, manager of the SAii Phi Phi Island Village hotel in Phi Phi Don, acknowledges that the high number of visitors still poses a risk to the natural environment, as the bay is a small part of the park, and proposes limiting boat access.
"Perhaps limiting (boat access) to guests of Phi Phi (Don) Island" and banning boats from Phuket and Krabi, says Chao, who admits that balancing tourism and environmental protection is difficult.
