Thailand’s famous Maya bay that was used in Leonardo Di Caprio’s ‘The Beach’ film, will be closed to visitors until 2021.
Twenty years ago, Maya Bay on Ko Phi Phi Island, one of Thailand’s untouched bays, was flooded with a Hollywood film and a flood of tourists hit the road.
Maya Bay became popular thanks to the 2000 film The Beach, starring Oscar-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio, directed by British director Danny Boyle.
In the film, the cove where young people who settled in a colony far from civilization settled, thousands of tourists soon flocked. Plastic packages thrown by tourists sunbathing and snorkelling at the beach caused three quarters of coral rocks to disappear. The waste water of the hotels built into the bay was also given to the sea.
It was temporarily closed last year because of the rapidly increasing number of visitors causing great damage to the environment. Before its closure, the bay was visited by 5,000 people a day, and so most coral reefs had disappeared.
Authorities extended the ban on visitors for two more years to completely cure the ecology of the Mayan Gulf. Since the Gulf was closed to visitors, blackfin reef sharks have begun to be seen again.
Visits: 78
