- Led by the Neighborhood Assembly for the Degrowth of Tourism (Assemblea de Barris pel Decreixement Turístic), protesters listed 13 demands in a manifesto published on Saturday, including limits on tourist accommodation, cutting back on the cruise ship terminal at the city’s port and an end to publicly funded tourism advertising.
- Local authorities estimated that 2,800 people took part in the protest. Daniel Pardo Rybakova, 48, a member of the organising group, said that as many as 20,000 people from 170 organisations took part in the protest.
- Rybakova said the use of water guns was a spontaneous decision by individual protesters and not suggested by organizers. “Water in the face is not pleasant, but it is not violent,” she said.
- Responding to growing concerns, Barcelona Mayor Jaume Corboni Pledged The government announced on Saturday that it would set aside 10,000 homes normally used by tourists for local residents and take other measures, including increasing taxes on tourists.
Barcelona has long been a popular tourist destination. Nearly 26 million people visited the region last year, according to official statistics, and Spain is the second most tourist-intensive country in the world, according to the United Nations Tourism Agency. Barcelona has a population of 1.7 million.
With Venice, “This is where the backlash against overtourism started,” said TC Chan, a geography professor at the National University of Singapore who studies urban tourism.
“As far as I know, there was no overt violence. But [overtourism] “This was already recognized at least a few years before the pandemic,” he said in an email, noting that residents had put up “no tourists” signs in their neighborhoods. “What happened in Barcelona will likely spread to tourist-filled locations across Europe,” he added.
Barcelona is not alone in its frustration with tourists: regions in Japan, Indonesia, Greece, Italy and the Netherlands have also taken measures to curb inflows. Over the past year.
In Japan, a town is installing giant screens at a popular photo spot in front of Mount Fuji to stop tourists taking selfies and causing traffic jams. Last year, the Greek government introduced a timed-entry ticket system at the ancient Acropolis, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, limiting daily visitors to 20,000. Venice experimented with charging tourists extra, and Amsterdam has restricted the construction of new hotels.
“I think the key point here is sustainable tourism development and sustainable management of domestic tourist flows,” said JJ Chan, a tourism geographer at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.
As a solution, Zhang suggested controlling traffic by determining the capacity of popular spots and “using technology that can transmit real-time data to tourists” to avoid overcrowding.
But Bob McKercher, a professor of tourism at Australia’s University of Queensland, raised a different issue: The majority of tourists in the world are domestic. “Overtourism may be a long-standing problem,” he said. “Can you really stop people from visiting your country?”
Beatriz Rios contributed to this report.
