It’s not often I can claim to have witnessed (first-hand) the birth of a trend, or in this case a backlash.
I lived in Barcelona for a time in the 1990s and watched the locals gradually shift from trumpeting the city’s newfound economic success, built in part on a booming tourist trade, to decrying it as a soulless money grab that had compromised the city’s identity.
They claimed the city’s historic quarters including its famous Ramblas boulevard had become tawdry tourist traps, havens for pickpockets and thus no-go areas for locals.
The overcrowding is arguably worse now.
The Catalan capital was, and still is, unique in being a second city with twice the tourist footfall of the capital, Madrid. The city and surrounding area play host to roughly 26 million tourists a year, a quarter of Spain’s total.
The city’s rapid regeneration, which coincided with its hosting of the 1992 Summer Olympics, was initially seen as a template for other cities.
The term “Barcelonisation” is now a dirty word in urban planning. It describes the negative consequences of overtourism: the displacement of local populations in favour of tourists; and the conversion of local housing to Airbnbs as locals get priced out of their homes, a problem that also afflicts us in Ireland.
According to a Vic University study, Barcelona has the highest density of tourist apartments in Europe: 12 for every 1,000 residents, compared with 10 in Rome and seven in London.
The city and its negative interface with mass tourism is now a microcosm of the continent’s wider experience.
Overcrowding, homogenised shops and eateries have gutted the cultural and historic centres of Europe’s most famous cities. And it’s not just the cities that are being overwhelmed, even the Greek islands say they can’t cope with the influx. Santorini and Mykonos are recording up to 200 tourists per resident, leaving their local infrastructures – ferries, accommodation, water – swamped.
The Greek island of Zante, chief destination for Irish Leaving Cert students, has a population of 40,000 but recorded a mind-boggling six million overnight stays in 2023.
Things must be pretty bad when these island economies – which are almost entirely dependant on tourism revenue – start raising the white flag.
To address the issue, the Greek government has unveiled a new “special spatial framework for tourism” which caps visitor numbers in high-pressure areas while regulating tourist-related construction.
Significantly the plan sets a maximum number of tourist beds on certain islands, which have expanded almost unchecked to this point.
Barcelona is planning a similar crackdown. It recently appointed its first commissioner for sustainable tourism, José Antonio Donaire.
“We’ve reached the end of the road, Barcelona has reached the maximum number of tourists it can accommodate,” Donaire said in a recent interview.
“We don’t want more tourists, not even one more, but we need to manage those we have,” he said.
In 2028 the city’s authorities plan to revoke the licences for 10,000 legal tourist apartments. The hope is that these properties will find their way back into the rental market to alleviate the city’s housing crisis.
The Government here plans to restrict short-term lets in towns with a population above 20,000 to address the housing shortage.
Amsterdam has adopted even more stringent rules, reducing the annual cap on short-term rentals from 30 to just 15 nights a year in high-demand areas, a move that Airbnb and other platforms say will cost thousands of jobs.
The trade-off between tourism revenue and quality of life is a tricky one.
“There is no easy fix for this. The Instagram age has made the phenomenon worse,” travel commentator Eoghan Corry says.
“People who travel to an aspirational location are mandated by popular culture to go to the same overcrowded and sometimes over-rated places to fill their checklist,” he says.
“It is when tourism is badly managed, or the infrastructure takes time to catch up, that the problems arrive,” Corry says.
Recent protests in Spain – under the banner “we want neighbours, not tourists” – are essentially directed at government for a shortfall in infrastructure, accommodation, facilities, and against price hikes which protesters say are caused by tourists.
There’s no disputing that tourism brings big benefits to local communities.
“It is one of the industries where profit is spread most speedily and directly to everyone in the supply chain, porters, waiters, drivers, stall holders,” Corry says.
“How many Michelin Star restaurants would we have in small west of Ireland towns without international tourists to sustain them?”
Holidays and leisure are not going away and people will continue to move and travel en masse, especially with cheap airfares. That said, Europe’s tourism industry is at a turning point. The era of unchecked growth is over.
But it’s not obvious if the more regulated environment will change the trajectory or be enough to satisfy frustrated locals.
