We are in the last hours of our fifth holiday in Malta, taken as before at Comino Hotel. As ever, the service has been impeccable, but more so, it has been kind. One of our company is disabled, and the staff, and indeed every Maltese person we have been in contact with on all our stays, has been kind. It is a mark of your islands.

I am writing, impertinently as a foreigner, but I hope less so as an admiring and frequent visitor, to ask you to think most carefully before you take up the offer of mass tourism. You could find yourselves “host” every year to visitors numbering eight times your total population.

The equivalent, in my own country, the UK, would be a yearly invasion of 480 million people. Quite simply, no society on earth can survive an imbalance like that intact. Many of you will make a lot of money. Some, will make millions. But your whole economy will be twisted into the service of this horde; utterly dependent on it for survival. If terrorism, or the price of aviation fuel collapses the industry, where will such an economy turn?

Sadly, also, with that number, you will not get our best, or anything like it. Whole areas will be turned into all night, heavy drinking no go areas, with noise levels you cannot presently imagine. If those of your influential backers of this move have not yet been to Kos, Falariki, or Ibiza, then they should. If they have already, and have not told you what to expect, then they should be ashamed.

Most of all, you will lose what we have found most precious here. More precious even than your matchlessly clear water and blue skies; what is actually, though you may not entirely know it, your greatest “asset” in the “international tourist market”. You will lose your kindness. It will simply not survive the numbers. You can smile, and greet, and use your imagination to meet the needs of one, of 10, even of a 100. But not 10,000. And then you will, for the international tourist trade, be “used up” and they will move on to some luckless elsewhere.

Please don’t do it. What you have is unique; a combination of gentleness and pride we have found nowhere else, and which, once lost, can never be regained.

William Chatterton

London