A beautiful coast, where friendly and unpretentious fishing settlements or nice sandy beaches and bays used to have that lazy and undemanding charm, was once such an attractive feature of the French or Spanish Mediterranean. Clean. Less crowded. Orderly. Peaceful. It used to be a pretty wild coast but tourism had taken hold all the way and it had since been tamed and developed. Busy promenades with stalls and commercial streets with shops and hotels, or private luxury estates grew like mushrooms transforming the region into a machine for doing business. Same with the Himalayas that for thousands of years served as a natural barrier for visitors. The mass tourism has an enormous influence on the local economies, but the character of places and traditional cultures slowly disappear.

So, it is my hope that the Wild Atlantic Way and places like Killary Harbour, known as ‘the only fjord in Ireland’, that runs at the border between counties Galway and Mayo will be protected for ever from entrepreneurs who would build summer resorts, dig up or chop down anything for money, capital and growth.