OUR Municipality of Sifnos becomes the first Cyclades which asks the state to stop building cave houses and ban private swimming pools. The municipality expresses serious concern about the “destruction of the cultural heritage of the island” and demands stricter measures to protect against dizzying Tourism development.

A few days ago, the municipality sent an appeal to three ministries (environment, culture and shipping), to the urban planning department of Milos (to which it applies) and to agencies providing opinions on Building Permits (Architectural Council of Syros, Architectural Committee of the Municipality of Sifnos). “In a landscape that is constantly changing from frenzied “development”, as a result of an intense tourist wave of recent years, the only salvation that could exist would be protective measures and their protection by the competent authorities and services. “Brake”, which is essential in all the coming cataclysms and alterations,” he says.

The municipality identifies four practices that it describes as destructive:

• Licensing of cave houses and construction of buildings from raw stone. “How many buildings have been built, changing the morphology of our island and its special architectural character, which is an element of special cultural, ecological and economic value, since it represents a starting point for the tourist promotion of our island. The license for stone buildings that try to imitate old farmhouses has only succeeded in giving birth to villas that have changed the image of Sifnos,” he says.

• Licensing of residential pools that “exacerbate the problem of water scarcity”.

Letter from the municipality to the three ministries, city planning and agencies that issue opinions on building permits.

• Approval of permits near monuments. “A typical example is the Pulati area, where the church of the same name is a proclaimed monument (Governmental newspaper 209/B/19.04.1991) with a protection radius of 200 meters. At this particular moment, the damage done is final and irreparable, with insulting permissions for the environment and for the Pulati monument.”

• Finally, a change in paths, “which is a change in the morphology of the island.”

The municipality recalls that since 1976 Sifnos has been declared a “place of special natural beauty”, but without specifying which organization is obliged to protect it. And it ends with a request to ban caves and private pools, to ban visible masonry, and to give no permits to off-plan areas other than ground floors.

The Cycladic Association of Architects also pointed to the destruction taking place in the Cyclades due to excavations that were allowed outside of Santorini under the 2012 building regulations (see “K” 11/13/2022). As they reported, “when colleagues at the Foreign Ministry began drafting legislation on the ‘construction of hollow buildings’ and predicted that this pioneering practice would introduce buildings into the environment and their topography (while giving a significant building bonus) it was impossible to imagine that this imaginary practice would actually be contrary to goodness. Today, after the full implementation of the legislation, the result obtained is mainly negative and harmful to the environment, with the main characteristics being oversized buildings on slopes that require significant earthworks, that is, irreversible interventions,” they assess.

It is also worth noting that, as the engineers note, in addition to the pools, the islands of the Cyclades are filled with … jacuzzis, which are usually installed with permits for the “water element”.