Acadia National Park had its third-busiest year ever in 2024, according to the National Park Service.
The park had an estimated 3.96 million visits last year, according to park service data. That total topped the 3.88 million visits it had in 2023, but trailed the 3.97 million visits it had in 2022 and the 4 million visits it had in 2021.
Before 2021, the park’s highest number of visits in any calendar year was 3.5 million visits in 2017. Since 2016, when both the park and the National Park Service celebrated their 100th anniversaries, visitation to the coastal national park has soared above 3 million visits per year.
The exception is 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic limited the number of visits to 2.67 million. Since then, the number of people visiting the park has increased even further, as people have avoided crowds more and sought to spend more time outside.
This past October, when conditions in the park were fairly dry and balmy, the park had a record number of visits for that month with nearly 568,000.
The annual crush of visitors, however, has turned into a divisive issue in Bar Harbor, which is the primary service town for park visitors and has a population of only 5,000 people.
Despite objections from the local tourism industry, Bar Harbor voters have adopted limits on vacation rental properties and twice have decided to greatly reduce the amount of cruise ship traffic that the town draws each summer and fall.
Town officials also are exploring the possibility of imposing limits on hotel development in order to ease the pressure on residents, and on public infrastructure and services.
