Mass tourism difficulties hit fever pitch in Barcelona on Saturday as protesters threw things and sprayed travelers with water guns and canned beverages, when shouting “tourists go house.”
The protesters — indignant about the city’s very long-standing challenges with overtourism — used thick law enforcement-design tape to block resort entrances and sidewalk cafes in the compact community of Barceloneta in a symbolic energy to close the establishments.
The crowd, which numbered some 3,000 persons in accordance to area media, also marched holding a huge banner demanding that town officials “minimize travelers now.”
Films and images clearly show people making an attempt to keep away from the crowds — some walking away from their tables mid-food — though others, including restaurant staff, verbally sparred with anti-tourism activists.
The demonstration coincides with Barcelona’s peak summer season vacation months. In 2023, lodge occupancy costs neared 80% in July and August, as the metropolis of 1.6 million individuals swelled to accommodate far more than 4 million visitors, in accordance to the Barcelona Metropolis Council.
Record-breaking arrivals
A protester in Barcelona on July 6, 2024.
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But the sensitive dance in between locals and site visitors had spiraled very long prior to that.
Inns in the city quadrupled from 1990 to 2023 to accommodate a rush of vacationers, which surged from 1.7 million to 7.8 million in the course of the exact same time period, in accordance to the Barcelona City Council. That will not include the tens of millions who vacation to the city’s outskirts also, it notes.
The town also buckles underneath the fat of the Barcelona Cruise Port as day-trippers descend on the metropolis by the hundreds. The port processed some 2.2 million travellers in 2023, up from 560,000 in 2000, in accordance to its internet site.
A girl eating at a cafe in Barceloneta becoming confronted by a protester.
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The outcome is a metropolis in which quite a few locals can no longer afford to pay for to stay, activists say — most notably since of the housing marketplace, exactly where rents have increased 68% in the earlier ten years, according to Barcelona’s mayor, Jaume Collboni.
Collboni announced in June that Airbnb-design shorter-expression household rentals would be banned in the metropolis by 2028. The go would include some 10,000 flats again into the lengthy-term rental marketplace.
Two tourists on bicycles getting stopped in entrance of a demonstration against mass tourism in Barcelona on July 6, 2024.
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A report revealed by Barcelona’s Metropolis Council in 2023, titled “Notion of Tourism in Barcelona” displays additional residents truly feel tourism is useful, relatively than detrimental, to the city. Having said that, the gap in between these quantities has closed by means of the a long time, it confirmed.
Fifty percent of the 1,860 respondents surveyed reported they modify in which they go in the town due to the fact of travellers. “They prevent a common region all over the town centre (Plaça Catalunya, La Rambla, Gothic Quarter, Raval, Outdated Town, Waterfront), as very well as the Sagrada Família space. In terms of precise areas, Park Güell tops the record of those intentionally avoided.”
Even these who acknowledge the economic contribution of tourism are starting to be disillusioned by the sheer range of travelers in the town, in accordance to the report.
“Far more and a lot more people feel that Barcelona has arrived at its tourism ability limit,” it states.
