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Protesters in Barcelona have sprayed visitors with water as part of a demonstration against mass tourism.
Demonstrators marching through areas popular with tourists on Saturday chanted “tourists go home” and squirted them with water pistols, while others carried signs with slogans including “Barcelona is not for sale.”
Thousands of protesters took to the streets of the city in the latest demonstration against mass tourism in Spain, which has seen similar actions in the Canary Islands and Mallorca recently, decrying the impact on living costs and quality of life for local people.
The demonstration was organised by a group of more than 100 local organizations, led by the Assemblea de Barris pel Decreixement Turístic (Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth).
I fucking guarantee every single one of the locals out there spraying people and yelling at tourists has been a tourist at some point in their life. Even if it was for a day trip to Madrid or Valencia or Bilbao, they were tourists who didn’t deserve to be attacked just for seeing some place new. They are just hateful hypocrites who like annoying people for fun.
They have a legitimate concern with housing prices and how the government has allowed (until recently) Airbnb to drive up their housing costs. But the tourists aren’t the problem. And if they want to get rid of all tourists, let them A) find out how much their economy relies on tourism, and B) never be allowed to leave their city again.
They’ve done a good job of broadcasting that tourism is a problem there. I’ll respect that next time I make travel plans. Assuming others think like me, then the protest has been effective.
Yup. Sucks to be those tourists for sure but it’s not like they were in danger.
Just a shitty feeling. You come to appreciate the culture, food, the views, you name it; to just be a visitor, a guest, and you get yelled at to go home.
Fucking yell at your government for allowing Airbnb to fester, instead of randos who support local businesses…
(not directed at you, just venting)
Nope. At least in Lisbon (which is probably just the same as Barcelona) the vast majority of them go straight at the tourist traps. They barely get any contact with the culture beyond having some foreigner guide pretend he knows about the city point at things while driving their rickshaw in the most annoying possible way. At the end of the day they end up eating whatever sounds foreign while listening to foreign music. This is an actual common complaint people have in Lisbon, that it is not Lisbon, it has been pretending it is Disneyland for the last 10-15 years.
There are places where people do that kind of tourism you’re describing. Barcelona, Lisbon and a few more popular places, for the vast majority of tourists, is not.
As for the “support” argument, they mostly support low-wage low-qualification boss-owns-50-other-places businesses while, collaterally, raising the expenses of every other business, prompting those to just close the doors and move elsewhere. If you are qualified in basically anything, the job market in Lisbon is a mess. Plenty of people do lie about their qualifications to state them as lower than they are, just in order to get these crap jobs. The purchasing power fell, locals are actually much poorer since the mass tourism wave that started when the world rebound from 2008. The median salary in Lisbon is like 1000€ while a rent for a cube starts at like 800-1200€.
As for the “yell at the government”, I don’t know about the situation in Barcelona, but in Portugal, the far-right just received 20% of the votes because they are the only ones addressing those problems (in a very “close the doors” kind of way). Some municipalities straight up started not giving a damn at as they cash in more from the tourists than from the local’s taxes. Oeiras and Cascais, two kind of famous tourist destinations next to Lisbon straight up are renaming official stuff to English in order to appease their real clients (eg. Not the people who live there).
One thing I didn’t see you mention is that Spain and Portugal have a specific issue which I haven’t really seen anywhere else, which is the British coming there so much that some areas are basically turning into UK-bis zones but with more sun. If you go around Málaga you find more pubs and Guinness than tapas. You lose everything that makes these places what they are. And it’s not just tourism as you’d think about where people come for a week or two, but also a lot of people buying property and either living there part time or moving there for retirement, compounding these real estate issues.
That’s Algarve for you. It just straight away stopped having Portuguese people. The entire south coast of Portugal is now a British colony.
Except the retirees, people only go there in the summer so, by May, “business” owners need to hire like 50k persons willing to do crap jobs and by September they all get fired. Ofc that people aren’t really willing to do that so we get the added bonus of bosses going to journals to complain that “there isn’t a shortage of jobs, it is the Portuguese that do not want to work”. What a dream job, to live in a cardboard box to appease Brits looking for the cheapest nice-place.
Whatever happened there that was Portuguese is no more.
Interesting. Valid points…
yeah I’ll respect that by not going to Barcelona
That’s what they would prefer and the point of their protests. Sarcasm doesn’t really fit here in this context.
My understanding is the people understand tourism funds things, but that they dont appreciate the divided treatment, such as the water restrictions tourists do not have to abide by.
Barcelona is overrated anyway, IMO. There are many better cities/towns in Spain.
Never been to Barcelona and never wanted to go even though people kept telling me it’s beautiful (sounded overhyped to me).
Now I want to go there less, and I’m happy about that :D
There’s a lot of nuance there with very vocal people due to recent history. It also has a lot to do with awareness of the major water restrictions residents are under but tourists are not (thus the water pistols). If they make news scaring off tourists, it forces the government to reconsider the balance they’ve put on tourist funding vs local economy.
I’m not saying I like what’s happening or not, just saying there is a lot to unpack when you don’t live there.
It’s also quite likely the majority was not born in Barcelona
Do you have a source for that?
It’s a big city, I think it’s pretty common that people move there from all over the country for work/studies.
I don’t think that’s relevant at all. Residents of Barcelona should still not be pushed out by BnBs.
People need to realize that tourism is almost like a favour to a country. You literally generate value in your home and go pour it into another economy.
Tourism has always been mutually beneficial and any government can and has the right to reduce it if they really really want to, they don’t though cause they like the money.