Portuguese tourist Fabio Figueirado wanted to ad-mire beautiful buildings on a romantic getaway in Paris, but instead he and his partner have found themselves navigating pavements piled high with garbage.
“I’ve never seen a city with so much trash on the street,” said the 25-year-old, near a mound of bulging bin bags across the road from the city’s main opera house. “They must collect it once a week or something, it’s not very nice at all.”
Tourists flock to Paris for fairy-tale walks and iconic monuments, but piles of uncollected trash because of strikes against a pension reform are spoiling the experience for many foreign visitors.
The French capital’s municipal garbage collectors have been on strike since last week as part of na-tionwide action against the deeply unpopular bill to hike the retirement age and increase contributions for a full pension.
The walkout has left 6,600 tonnes of rubbish piled up on sidewalks in around half of the capital, according to city authorities.
Sitting near the Notre Dame cathedral, Martha Velasquez, 52, was tucking into ice cream with her family not far from another stream of black bags.—AFP
