How cities like Barcelona can manage the worst effects of over-tourism

A tourist plays with soap bubbles in front of the Triumphal Arch, near the Parliament of Catalonia, in Barcelona, on August 7. Reuters

You don’t have to wander too far off the beaten path in Barcelona to find an anti-tourist message daubed on a wall.

“Tourists go home” is the most common refrain, usually delivered in block capitals and black spray paint, although the singular and more personal variant is almost as prevalent. Another alternative is “tourists go home, refugees welcome”.

The steps and walls leading towards the Unesco-listed Park Guell – a popular tourist trail with Antoni Gaudi’s city on the hill serving as its destination point – are daubed with the words “mass tourism kills our city” and the unsettling and thankfully unheeded “let’s lynch the tourists”. These messages appear with rhythmic cadence, but it would be wrong to say they are ubiquitous.

Graffiti on a shop shutter at the Gracia neighbourhood in Barcelona, Spain, on August 4. Reuters

This weekend marks seven years since the August 2017 terror attacks on La Rambla in the centre of the city and a nearby coastal town, which killed 16 people and injured more than 100 more. The attacks were claimed by ISIS and prompted short-term concern that visitors may stay away from the city for months and years to come.

In the event, the extraordinary show of solidarity by residents and officials and their powerful “we are not afraid” message brought tourists back in record numbers. Barcelona hosted more than 20 million visitors in 2019, a peak before the once in a lifetime trough of 2020 when the world stood still and stayed home. Last year, more than 25 million visitors made an overnight stay in Barcelona and its environs.

More than 30 years after Barcelona hosted one of the great Olympic Games of the late 20th Century – delivering an event devoid of the tragedy, financial ruin, boycotts and scandals that had visited the previous five summer games – the city’s energy and its enviable portfolio of cultural assets act as an inviting beacon to the world.

Reuters reported this month that Spain received 42.5 million international visitors in the first six months of the year, putting it on track to equal or exceed last year’s record-breaking figure of 85 million visitors, given the third-quarter peak period of the year was still to come.

Tourists in Marbella, Spain last month. Reuters

While Spain’s coastal resorts have almost always swelled with visitors during the summer months, Barcelona and Madrid now act as year-round cultural lodestars and the airports in both cities are among the busiest in Europe. Cruise ships disperse thousands of tourists every day into Barcelona in peak times, making it one of the most popular cruising destinations worldwide.

The city made global headlines last month when anti-tourism demonstrators took to the streets to fire water pistols at visitors who were sitting at outdoor cafes.

It was a damp squib demonstration and an almost comical form of protest, but it pushed its way on to summer news agendas. The protest was accompanied by demonstrators holding cardboard placards high in the air, which bore the same messages referenced earlier in this column. Estimates vary as to how many people took part, but the message was emphatically delivered.

Nick March/ The National

Talk to those who live in Barcelona and they will offer their own view on how those graffiti messages and protests don’t speak for everyone and more likely express the views of a minority, an opinion regularly reinforced by the cafes and stores that unreservedly welcome visitors through their doors, sometimes only metres away from some spray-painted wall or other.

By several measures, Barcelona is operating close to the cutting edge of mitigating the worst effects of over-tourism, including acknowledgment by officials that change needs to come, although the protesters clearly believe it's not arriving fast enough.

Graffiti messages and protests don’t speak for everyone and more likely express the views of a minority

The location of the main cruise terminal has moved away from the city centre, in recognition of the disruption its presence can cause to local residents. The move also reduces the amount of leisure ships that can dock at any given time.

Hotel guests are charged a tourism tax, although the counter argument to such fiscal regimes is that relatively small charges will only deter the few. They do at least pay for something, however, be that street furniture, cleaning services or educational signage.

Barcelona’s major attractions also tightly control their visitor numbers and strongly advise people to book in advance, meaning “sold out” signs at places such as La Sagrada Familia are more common than those “tourists go home” placards.

That doesn’t stop thousands milling around outside the city’s prized attractions, but it does mean that queues don’t snake forlornly past apartment blocks.

It is in those same residential buildings that one of the keys to the over-tourism crisis may be found.

Earlier this year, the city’s Mayor, Jaume Collboni, said thousands of short-term rental licences would not be renewed when they expire in 2028, potentially returning these dwellings to the long-term market and allowing citizens to go back to city living after being priced out by Airbnb-style rentals to tourists. That is the hope, at least, although doubts persist as to whether this will deliver the necessary course correction.

If balance does return to the market then harmony may also prevail. Jobs, livelihoods and, perhaps, the future of an entire industry depend on that equilibrium being found – not just in Barcelona but in several other cities around the world that exist on the frontline of mass tourism.