Visiting a near-empty Santorini in June 2020 – a few months after the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis implored tourists to come because the airport would open again after a three-month lockdown.

“It is a great pleasure to be here in Santorini … to send a message: Greece is ready to welcome tourists this summer by putting their safety and their health as a number one priority,” Mitsotakis said.

Then all hell broke loose – the pandemic worsened, international air traffic nearly ceased, and residents and businesses on one of the world’s most popular islands essentially begged people to come back when they could.

Santorini was even then already being overrun by foreign visitors before the coronavirus stopped that and slowed the hordes for a couple of years, before health measures were lifted in 2022 in a desperate move to get tourists back.

Now the island is so overwhelmed – as is Mykonos and other popular formerly-lesser-visited islands and some areas around the country – that limits were put on how many cruise ships could dock daily, just as the Acropolis has set a ceiling of 20,000 visitors per day.

The problem is that Greece is cooking the Golden Goose, so many tourists in some spots that the character of the islands and regions is no longer traditional but a kind of bizarro world Greece, a Disneyland or Las Vegas version.

Compounding the problem that it said it recognized, the government of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis – who has opened the doors and floodgates to rich foreign investors building luxury resorts on alleged public beaches – is going to allow even more while proclaiming it wants to deal with overtourism.

This will not be solved because no government is going to turn away people spending money, even at the risk of eventually ruining the reasons they come, until, of course, they don’t anymore and move on to other countries.

More than 31 million people came in the record-breaking year of 2023, more than three times the country’s population, and no place was more overrun than Santorini, with a year round population of 15,480 but getting 2 million visitors a year.

That has resulted on the infrastructure being strained to the breaking point and Mayor Nikos Zorzos told Kathimerini that, “the surface of the island covered with buildings reaches 20 percent, which is higher than that of Attica,” the region where Athens is located.

He said that he’s demanding that, “not a single new hotel bed, not a single new short-term rental bed be allowed on the island” while construction outside town zoning “must be stopped completely.”

He might as well spit into a hurricane because press releases of phony concern aside, the government would let foreign and domestic developers build on every square inch of land, just as happened with Athens’ three rivers which were covered over for cement buildings, depriving the city of its Seine or Thames or Charles River.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, Mykonos – AKA Mafia Island – is in the hands of organized crime and ignores any idea of government intervention the same way as do Greece’s shipping oligarchs who have power over prime ministers.

Mykonos would be better off sinking into the sea because it’s so corrupt, a nasty corrupt cauldron of price-gouging restaurants and night clubs, a hedonistic hell where police and inspectors look the other way or at least into their pockets.

Greece has little regard for the safety of tourists – islands don’t have enough doctors, nurses, medical staff, hospitals or ambulances – and so far this year at least 10 tourists have died after going out on hikes on walking trails that have little or no warnings or directions, leaving them on their own.

In some places the “Tourists Go Home” graffiti has taken root, although if that happened, then the signs would say “Tourists Come Back” once people realize that these people bring in as much as 20 percent of Greece’s annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

No one really knows what to do because – where’s the balancing point or tipping point as to how many tourists Greece can handle, although one way would be to convince them to stop going to the usual places like Santorini and Mykonos and go to quiet little islands.

Those exist and it’s there that you’ll find Greece as it once was, not the overwhelmed islands or the fake Athens Riviera where successive governments have sold out to private businesses putting luxury resorts on public beaches.

Mitsotakis even dedicated one of them, participating in the opening this year of one on Athens’ cost, the One & Only Aesthesis – which now has another resort on the island of Tzia. The one in Athens, on a public beach, built a wall and gate to keep out the riff raff and hoi polloi so that customers forking over more than 2,000 euros ($2,165) can have a private beach.

Try bringing your own chair and an umbrella to get in there – the Constitution says you can – but you won’t. And don’t count on the MyCoast app reporting beaches violating leases by taking over more than 50 percent of the space being enforced there or any resort.

There’s no overtourism in luxury resorts because the rich have space and the numbers are limited and confined mostly to the wealthy, and that’s before the renamed Ellinikon opens. Tourists, Keep Coming.