The article discusses the impact of overtourism in Barcelona, where locals are protesting against mass tourism's negative effects, such as rising rents and social issues. Despite the economic benefits of tourism, residents demand significant changes to protect their communities. Movements advocate for limiting tourist numbers, regulating short-term rentals, and ensuring that tourism benefits local populations. The article emphasizes the need for a more sustainable and equitable tourism model.
2024
While mass tourism is praised for its economic benefits, it comes at a cost for local communities, who face soaring rents and negative social and ecological consequences. In Barcelona, residents are demanding fundamental change. How do we strike a balance between democratic, accessible travel and the protection of city dwellers?
Every single day, more than 170 thousand tourists visit Barcelona to take a picture next to Antoni Gaudí’s glorious Sagrada Familia or enjoy a stroll through the popular Ramblas. The Paradise-like city is one of the world’s most popular destinations for travel makers, but for some weeks it has been experiencing a rather unconventional scene: residents are filling the streets to call out a tourism model that they argue needs drastic limitations.
According to government monitoring bodies, Barcelona received around 26 million tourists in 2023 alone. However, grassroots movements provide a much higher estimate of approximately 31 million visitors per year, which is almost 20 times the number of permanent residents of the city (1.6 million). Most of these travellers do not spend more than two nights in Barcelona, as is also the case in other highly visited European tourism capitals: a press release by the Eurostat, the EU Office for Statistics, revealed that 1.19 billion overnight stays were recorded only in the first half of 2023.
Over the past decade, Barcelona’s residents have shown their discontent with the city’s direction on tourism through their “tourists go home” graffiti that covers much of the urban landscape. This dissatisfaction has now escalated into street protests, with demonstrations making international headlines and sparking conversations around the sustainability and fairness of the current tourism model.
“A critical factor triggering these protests is the effects of the Covid pandemic, which although difficult for many segments of society, were a relief when it comes to recovering city spaces,” says Daniel Pardo Rivacoba, a member of the Neighbourhoods for Tourism Degrowth movement, a platform that has most outspokenly denounced the mass tourism model in Barcelona and its handling by public administrations.
Speaking to the Green European Journal, the 48-year-old community organiser said: “when the process of publicity, which had previously taken place over at least 30 years in the case of Barcelona, is revived in less than three years and with a very recent memory of what it was like to live without tourism, it becomes very fast and violent for the people.”
They have not kicked me out yet, but many of my friends have had to leave.
Locals feeling the squeeze
Pardo Rivacoba is among the dwindling number of locals who have managed to keep living in Barcelona’s city centre. He shares his apartment because housing prices in the area have continued to soar since hotels and Airbnbs seized most of the metropolitan neighbourhood for the tourism market.
“They have not kicked me out yet, but many of my friends have had to leave as [a] consequence [of overtourism],” he tells the Green European Journal with some bitterness.
Even if Pardo Rivacoba remains in the neighbourhood despite the pressure, mass tourism means that he and others who seek to hold on to their old areas are faced with constant small struggles: “Either you get used to sleeping with earplugs or you end up with mental health problems,” he claims, alluding to the incessant night noise. “And when it comes to local commerce for the city’s inhabitants, there are about two affordable bars left in the area. The rest are for tourists.”
Such indignation led the Neighbourhoods for Tourism Degrowth and other grassroots movements to take to the streets on July 6. In their manifesto, these movements called on Barcelona’s government to, among other things, limit the number of cruise terminals at the port, ban the construction of any new tourism accommodation facilities, end the sector’s privileges over water rights, and recover commerce and leisure infrastructure for the city’s locals.
These demands led Barcelona’s Mayor Jaume Collboni to announce a plan to cancel all short-term rental licenses by 2028 to create new housing for locals, ban cruise ships from docking at the city centre, and increase tourism taxes. Similarly, Madrid’s mayor also announced he would stop granting tourism licenses until the approval of a new strategy for 2025.
For the Neighbourhoods for Tourism Degrowth movement, these announcements are no more than mere words, similar to the promises they have been hearing about for years without seeing actual change. “What makes them not very credible is that the overall management of the city is still absolutely neoliberal and resembling the board of directors of a private company,” Pardo Rivacoba argues while reiterating the solution his movement fiercely defends: degrowth.
©Bianca Carrera Espriu
An inclusive tourism degrowth model
“What these movements are asking for is agreed consensual planned measures tackling how we want to live and coexist in order to continue to subsist in a finite planet,” says Asunción Blanco-Romero, a geography professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
In a joint paper titled Tourism and Degrowth, Blanco-Romero posits that such measures are about public regulations “so that there is an adequate tourism model for each of the areas where it is being considered to carry out this economic activity” and making sure that their intention is “improving the life of the population”.
The need for change is more urgent now than ever before: according to a 2023 report, the travel and tourism industry accounts for around 8.1 per cent of global CO2 emissions. Moreover, In 2022, the German Hotel and Restaurant Association told DW that about 17 to 50 kilograms of CO2 were produced per guest’s overnight stay, and that water consumption per person in five-star hotels could amount to a staggering 522 litres a day. In Barcelona, authorities declared a drought emergency last February, imposing water restrictions that civil society demands also be applied to the tourism sector.
In Italy, Venice has for years been warned of the negative impact of tourism in the city, mainly due to the damage to the lagoon by large ships and oil tankers entering every day via the Malamocco canal. Likewise, UNESCO warned Croatia’s Dubrovnik that its World Heritage Status was at risk due to the high number of visitors the small city receives: around 1.5 million yearly for a population of some 41,000.
Environmental risks aside, mass tourism has also turned cities like Amsterdam into open party houses, prompting the local government to become one of the first to announce a willingness to implement a cap on the number of tourists visiting the city, capping the number at 20 million a year.
“The way quality tourism is being defined and promoted is reducing tourism numbers significantly and trying to get tourists [to] pay more,” says Robert Fletcher, a professor at the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University. “There is going to have to be some type of much stronger government intervention to try to limit prices and allocate who is actually able to travel,” he tells the Green European Journal. “If you just leave the situation to the free market, which is what is happening right now, travelling becomes for elites.”
Professor Fletcher, who has researched tourism degrowth in the Netherlands, Spain, and other areas, suggests some non-elitist measures, including the establishment of price caps, allocating seats on airplanes and trains by income bracket, or banning elite forms of transportation such as private jets and yachts. Making rail networks more widespread and train tickets more accessible will also make sustainability-oriented measures such as bans on cheap short flights more inclusive: in Spain itself, the government has been offering discounts of up to 90 per cent on buses and trains operating nationally to promote sustainable local tourism.
“The intrinsic difficulty of undertaking a degrowth process in a capitalist framework is making sure that this degrowth is not classist,” says Pardo Rivacoba from Barcelona, the place where recently some locals shot water pistols at tourists. Videos of these incidents were misinterpreted as anger at middle-class individuals deciding to go on holidays in the Spanish city. However, as Pardo Rivacoba says, residents want to “address those responsible for the current situation, who are not the tourists, but those getting rich out of tourists.”
Shifting the focus from tourists to profiteers
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, as early as 2014, around 95 per cent of the money tourists spent on some tropical destinations ended up outside the local economy, and ultimately in the hands of foreign-owned tour operators, airlines, hotels, suppliers of imported drinks and food, etc. While the situation is less severe in Europe, in highly visited cities like Barcelona, big actors such as digital platforms, real estate investors, and airline companies are the ones benefitting the most from mass tourism.
“There is a huge number of international and vulture funds amongst the big tenants grabbing the market,” Professor Blanco-Romero says, “not to mention that a big chunk of the money collected through the tourism tax is mainly allocated towards promotion and the private sector.”
Media coverage of Barcelona’s protests against mass tourism has in some cases portrayed these demonstrations as an attack on the individual traveller. However, Robert Fletcher argues that in this type of mobilisation taking place worldwide, demands for making tourists disappear are never the case. “Protesters have been very clear, they are not talking about eliminating tourism entirely, but about reducing it to a level that is more sustainable, that still allows people to live in a destination and that changes the way the tourism industry is structured so that more [of] the benefits are distributed to those working in the industry, not just the people who control it.”
Also a researcher on the theme of convivial conservation and ecotourism, Fletcher believes that this structural change entails both political and individual responsibilities: “Making sure that as tourists we are trying to seek out more responsible travel, using facilities that are more socially sustainable and community-based, making sure that our own behaviour is not offensive… all of these things have a role to play,” he explains. “But we cannot rely on that to really change things: you need a structural effort to change how tourism is done.”
That is why the Neighbourhoods for Tourism Degrowth platform in Barcelona is seeking to take advantage of the current momentum gained through the protests to start continent-wide conversations on reimagining how tourism-related policies are shaped at the European level, which has primacy over national legislation. So far, international forums such as the Global Tourism Forum – taking place next November in Brussels – have failed to include local voices and civil society groups in their meetings.
“We have never developed this line of advocacy at the European level, until now,” Pardo Rivacoba says hopefully. “Some of us have thought that it would be good to talk among ourselves across Europe after everything that is happening in Spain: I think that it is a good moment to rethink the system completely.”