rock formation, the white sand and the blue sea at Kelingking beach regularly feature in tourist advertisements for the Indonesian island of Nusa Penida, a 45-minute boat ride from Bali. With a little good will you can see the silhouette of a T-Rex in the contours of the cliff. Tourists wait in lines at the clifftop viewpoint to take the perfect photo. Some of them also dare the very steep descent to the associated beach. Tourists are regularly injured.
To make the beach more accessible, a construction consortium started the construction of a 180-meter-high elevator structure directly on the beach in 2023. The glass elevator, which is 70 percent complete, was supposed to take tourists down and up from the viewpoint in the blink of an eye. But the tall white picket fence immediately met with a lot of resistance in the local community. The glass elevator did not open up the location, critics said, but destroyed the pristine character of the place, which attracts tourists.
Earlier this month, construction was halted because imperfections were noted by a committee that monitors spatial planning. On Sunday, Bali’s governor, Wayan Koster, decided that the structure must be completely demolished. The private operator, PT Indonesia Kaishi Tourism Property Investment Development Group, must complete this within six months. The lift was part of a larger plan for tourist facilities, including a ticket counter, a glass platform and a restaurant.
Initially, the project was defended by the Ministry of Tourism in Jakarta. The person in charge at the ministry, Hariyanto, told Tempo Magazine in October that the arrival of the elevator would affect tourism income. on the island would increase. According to the Indonesian news agency Antara visited in 2024 1.1 million tourists the island, which has less than fifty thousand inhabitants.
Dangerous current
But critics of the plans, such as Balinese senator Niluh Djelantik, pointed out that they put tourists at risk. The current at the beach is so strong and unpredictable that swimming is prohibited. Several tourists who could not resist the temptation died. The last one was one French tourist on October 15. According to Djelantik, the elevator construction is part of a larger problem in Bali. She told ABC News: “The administrators want to build at any price.”
Wayan Koster has now ordered the demolition of the elevator construction because the construction plans did not comply with the spatial planning rules in the vulnerable area on several points. For example, no building structures may be erected within one hundred meters of the coastline. But according to him, the decision also fits within the policy to “protect the landscape, culture and social values of Bali.”
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Earlier, the director of one of the project developers involved, PT Bangun Nusa Properti, reported to the Antara news agency that the project would be completed in 2023. formal approval had received. All requirements for the construction site would also have been met.
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