Forbes

The Spanish city of Barcelona and its inhabitants are fed up with over-tourism and are taking up extreme measures to say “enough is enough”: from angry protesters firing water pistols at unsuspecting tourists and red-taping the entry to hotels and restaurants, to local government pledging to freeze short-term rentals.

The water squirting, which happened on Saturday and has garnered more attention from the international media than most of the many demonstrations of recent months, was actually limited in scope and directed at diners sitting outside restaurants in the popular Ramblas district as protesters yelled “tourists go home.”

The action was part of a larger movement that brought together more than 2,800 protesters, according to official reports — 20,000, said organizers — under the banner “Enough! Let’s put limits on tourism,” and calling for controls on the number of visitors and for the implementation of a sustainable model.

“They are calling for government measures before a summer season that experts say will set new records in the city and the wider region of Catalonia,” reported Euronews. in an article on ‘Why has Europe fallen out of love with tourism?’

The ironic result was that hundreds of tourists taking selfies and other photos at the most popular sites found themselves photographing banners declaring “Barcelona is not for sale,” “Tourism kills the city” and “Tourists go home.”

A few water pistols and millions of tourists

“If they are outraged by a few water pistols, we are outraged that the tourist industry is impoverishing us and expelling us from our neighborhoods and cities,” tweeted the Association of Neighbors of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter.

With 1.6 million inhabitants and a staggering 31 million visitors each year, Barcelona joins cities like Venice among other super-popular cities in Europe, that are “suffering all the consequences of overcrowding,” writes the Spanish magazine El Salto.

Tourism in Barcelona has been growing exponentially over the past two decades. By 2019, it had reached more than 17 million visitors a year staying overnight in the city and almost another 10 million staying in the region and spending the day on the Barcelona streets.

The arrival of over 160,000 visitors a day, according to recent figures, has increased housing costs, which already represent a gross percentage of the average salary of a young person, exacerbating the difficulty for the local population to cope with housing payments and daily expenses — and finding themselves forced to leave the city.

Rents, already high, rose by 18% in June alone compared to the previous year in Barcelona and Madrid, according to the real estate website Idealista.

The case is the same for local businesses forced out by high costs only to be replaced by multinational chains.

The small, colorful water guns toted by a few demonstrators, along with others bearing red tape to cordon off hotels and restaurant entrances and holding “tourism kills the city” banners are symbolic of the backlash against mass tourism snarling not only Barcelona and other popular Spanish cities and islands but throughout European destinations jammed with increasingly less welcome visitors.

Tourists not welcome

From outspoken graffiti to hunger strikes, the locals’ frustrations “have boiled over in several other European honeypot destinations compelling local authorities to address and reassess the relationship between tourists and residents,” reports Euronews.

In Spain, the second most-visited country in the world, anti-tourism movements are multiplying. From Barcelona and Malaga in the south to the popular Balearic and Canary Islands, mass protests are surging and include activists on hunger strikes, to force local and national governments to declare a moratorium on mass tourism.

“The discontent with the tourist overcrowding and against an economic model that an increasing part of the population considers pernicious and unsustainable, has been bringing thousands of people out onto the streets in marches that join those that in May and June already filled the streets of Palma (Mallorca), Malaga or the Canary Islands,” explains the daily El Pais.

Mass tourism in the large cities, archipelagos and coastal areas not only cause disturbances for the local population that has to deal daily with limited parking and crowded parks, streets and markets. “It also compromises the very survival of the neighborhoods and their inhabitants with unaffordable increases in the price of housing and the extinction of traditional commerce,” writes El Salto.

“The model focused on the unlimited growth of tourism has been threatening the environment, basic natural resources and labour rights for some time, as platforms against mass tourism have been denouncing for years.”

Then there is the bigger picture: the ecological footprint of tens of thousands of flights each year, the growing demand for water that worsens the chronic drought in Catalonia, the degradation of natural spaces and a lower quality of jobs.

Why attack a lucrative sector?

How can the local population protest against what, in economic terms, is a lucrative sector that generates jobs, companies and businesses, the BBC asks in a special report about over-tourism in Spain. And who is really benefiting from this model?

The growth of the tourism sector thanks, among other reasons, to cheap flights, alternative lodgings and the possibility of ‘golden visas’ in exchange for investment offered by many European countries (although some, including Spain, have been curtailing it), has been changing the European landscape, from flights and airports to housing and commerce, leaving a trail of discontent and unrest in beautiful cities and picturesque towns.

“The pandemic put a pause on the problem,” El Pais reports. Protesters in the recent water pistols shooting told the paper that “on the first day that confinement measures were relaxed, the locals took advantage of the opportunity to go for a walk on a Rambla empty of tourists or take their children to play in the Plaça Reial. But the forecast is that this summer all records of visitors to the city will be broken.”

Called by more than 100 entities, the Saturday march was led by the Assemblea de Barris pel Decreixement Turístic, which has been advocating for years for a change of model and a decrease in tourism.

They’re demanding measures to stop the ‘massification’ that aggravates social inequalities, problems with access to housing and the environmental crisis.

Members of the City Council have acknowledged the overcrowding but have also said that it’s a “complex debate,” while members of the opposition accuse Barcelona’s mayor, Jaume Collboni, of “encouraging tourismophobia.”

During a City Council meeting last June, Collboni admitted that “rents have risen by close to 70% in the past 10 years, while the cost of buying a home has increased by almost 40%,” as reported in Forbes.

He announced a plan to revoke all tourist apartment licences by 2028. The question now is if the measure would actually result in such properties being put on the market for rent at reasonable prices.

For Apartur, Barcelona’s tourist apartments association, “Collboni is making a mistake that will lead to (higher) poverty and unemployment.” The organization warns that the ban would trigger a rise in illegal tourist apartments.

The local government released a statement warning that it would maintain strong controls to detect potential illegal short rental apartments once the ban takes effect.

The march, including the water-pistol carriers, ended in the Plaça del Mar, where a manifesto was read: “Citizens are directly affected by tourism, with rising living costs, rents, pressure on public services and the loss of the city’s local identity.”

The organisers, writes El Pais, are calling for a reduction in the number of flights landing locally, closure of cruise terminals at the port and an even stricter ban for tourist accommodation that would include hotels and residences.

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