Heliomania on the Med

Sun worshipers are overloading the spas and the sea

They are off. Not out of their minds exactly but driven, obsessed. There are at least 25 million of them right now, mostly prosperous Western Europeans, huddled like refugees on the packed fringes of the Mediterranean. They are taking part in a ritual, exercising a civil right, and in the process hungrily consummating a winter's yearnings. The summer vacation season is upon them, draining the gray, rainy cities of the north, flooding the beaches of Spain's Costa del Sol, France's Cote d'Azur, Italy's Capri and the Greek islands.

Every year a certain amount of happy frenzy attends the occasion, but the summer of '78 seems special. "I've never seen anything like it," says British Travel Agent Dennis Carver. "They're willing to go almost anywhere." As long as they go to the Med. The Continent's treasured southern beaches are awash in bodies glued together ham to hock. Dark-skinned Arabs flirt with pale northerners. Africans peddle snakeskin handbags and handcrafted jewelry. Dogs, children and wind surfers turn sand and sea into a hazardous obstacle course for casual bathers. In France the separation of "nude" and "family" beaches has been almost completely, well, swept away in the rush to expose as much skin to the sun as possible.

Everything on the Mediterranean --transportation systems, campground facilities, sanitation plants and patience --has been strained beyond limit by the heliomaniacs. As a result, the already serious pollution of the Mediterranean appears worse than ever.

The main focus of the vacation onslaught has been that 160-mile strip of overbuilt beach front in the south of France, the Cote d'Azur. Local rail terminals are overflowing as additional sun worshipers pour into Saint-Tropez, Sainte-Maxime, Cannes, Nice and Menton. When they arrive, along with myriad motorists who are clogging France's autoroute du soleil, a rude shock is waiting: no accommodations are available. As many as 1,000 people a day are redirected by the local tourist office to the Maritime Alps, inland and anywhere from 50 to 100 miles a way.

A lot more resolute vacationers choose to ignore that advice. An estimated 13 million visitors have mobbed hotels, overrun campgrounds and simply parked themselves on roadsides, in vineyards, on beaches and wherever else a speck of bare ground shows itself. Les campeurs sauvages (wild campers) number about 50,000. They are a particular irritation to police, since they will pitch a tent illegally in a parking lot, on a piece of highly desirable beach or even, as one did, on a shady traffic island in the middle of Cannes. Typical is Axel Koenigs, a young West German bank employee who drove to the Cote d'Azur with two friends. After trying 40 campgrounds without luck (and meantime sleeping in his Volkswagen), he invaded a freshly cut hayfield. Says he: "Since there is no possibility to find solitude, we intend to make the best of it."

So many wild campers have sprouted around Saint-Tropez that authorities have opened up campsites that formerly were closed because of lack of toilets and running water. Even that has not been enough. "You can't believe what a day is like here," says a young gendarme at nearby Ramatuelle. "People just dump their garbage wherever they feel like it. Each day we have piles of paper to process. We also have to give fines for unlicensed vendors, even fines for open homosexuality on the beaches. On top of that, my eyes are infected from swimming in the water here."

When a sewage purification plant in the town of Saint-Raphael overloaded, effluent poured into the sea, yet authorities were unable to keep campers out of the water despite an overpowering stench. Tourist officials claim that most beaches are safe for bathing, but the French monthly magazine Science et vie reports that health officials have found 649 cases of "negligible" pollution, 361 cases of the "medium" variety and 23 cases of "strong pollution" at 138 Mediterranean locations, among them Antibes, Cannes and Nice.

Elsewhere in Mediterranean Europe, the beach crush is also intense. Despite all the worries about terrorism, Italy's more than 30,000 hotels are booked solid. Illegal tents have popped up all along the coast in spite of police fines of as much as $95. Prices have gone wild on Sardinia's ritzy Costa Smeralda, where, at one Porto Cervo nightspot, a dish of ice cream costs $7.50 and a dinner tab of $175 a person is paid without a wince. "Porto Cervo is just one big slot machine," says one bemused American tourist. "Nobody cares." Italian vacationers obviously have the same blithe attitude toward water pollution as their counterparts in France: at the Roman resorts of Ostia and Fregene, bathers frolic only a few miles from Rome's principal raw-sewage outlets.

Spain has had a 20% rise in tourism so far this year, and by the end of 1978, officials expect to have welcomed a whopping 37 million visitors--one for every Spaniard. Those numbers will probably continue to rise in the future, despite last month's calamitous explosion of a chemical truck killing more than 150 campers. The government has legalized gambling at 18 resorts, mainly on the coast, and four of the planned casinos have just opened. The 150-mile Costa del Sol is already overcrowded. Sewage treatment in some places is appalling; human feces bob up and down among the bathers, and doctors report a rise in skin, eye and vaginal infections from dirty sand and water.

In Greece, waves of charter planes are landing all day long at Crete, Rhodes and Corfu, depositing a sizable proportion of the country's estimated 1.5 million visiting fun seekers this summer. Package tours have changed some of the islands from contemplative hideaways into vacation factories. Water pollution is less visible but still dangerous, and dermatologists in Athens are reaping a rich harvest from treating skin diseases caught by bathers.

When will the Mediterranean madness end? On Sunday night, Sept. 3. So far, all attempts to alter the ironclad European attitude toward July and August vacations have failed. Meanwhile a recent poll commissioned by the Paris daily Le Figaro has shown that workers would rather have more vacation than the equivalent extra pay--something that has ominous implications for the Med in the future and also for anyone trying to get a hotel room on its shores.

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