- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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).
Then you’re not paying attention. Plenty of such protests-with-thousands in a few major places that were overwhelmed. Barcelona, Maiorca, Lisbon, Algarve, probably most of Greece, Italy, Southern France, etc…
It is not false that the government has blame, however, there’s plenty of preverse incentive in here. Land prices skyrocketed and a lot of very well positioned individuals got very well in life.
At the end of the day, being a decent human being doesn’t require laws. If you know you’re competing with locals whose rents already are higher than their salaries, with their businesses that now can’t support rents any longer and generally browsing fake-local-crap (and I assure you that most mass tourism is), then you’re just making yourself unwelcome.
Even the “tourists are injecting money in the local economy” argument is in a good part bullshit. Ofc that some of it loops to everyone else, but the gains are generally very poorly distributed and many times negative as that money destroys homes and jobs.
If you go to some parts of Lisbon, you’re not going to be able to hear one single word of Portuguese. Just yday I heard about a guy complaining that tourists attempted to forbid him from going into a waterfall near his home because… It ruins their photos and they waited in line to have them while the guy just “skipped the queue”. Mass-tourists can’t just figure that it is a country where people live and not a theme park, the “we paid to come here, we have rights” argument is heard plenty of times.
Nothing worse than hearing that self-entitled argument along with “you’re not complaining when we use all our money here are ye???” Makes my blood boil.
Aren’t you figuring that we’d rather not have that? That money is mostly not reaching anyone but landlords, restaurant owners and rickshaws. We get poorer with tourism money.
The jobs that pay us more than 860€ (the minimum salary) disappear with mass tourism because 1) land values get too expensive 2) a lot of highly qualified people just emigrated away after being unable to pay rent.
People who attended STEM fields know that the way to get proper jobs is to leave the country, which is bloody unfair because we used to have them. Instead of 3k/mo white-collar jobs we get 860€/mo whipping simulators dealing with entitled tourists.
Ofc that not every job disappeared but since the economy is highly uncompetitive with it’s tourism focus, you get the worst possible scenario for everything else.
I’m going to guess you’re using an empiric “you”, because I was trying to agree with you! Everything you said is on point.
Sorry, how does any of this justify assaulting tourists?
I’m from London and now live in another tourist heavy city. It doesn’t justify assaulting people.
It doesn’t justify assaulting (albeit calling 3ml of water in the Mediterranean summer an assault is a bit of a stretch), but that was not the only thing you said. You were isolating Barcelona as a special case. I simply said that it is not isolated at all, that every popular region along the entire Mediterranean coast is suffering from the same.
London’s situation is bad but 1) 6 times more population dilutes tourism way better 2) London’s tourism is “going there, taking pictures, famous Harry Potter things, giant ferry wheel, bye” instead of “I like this weather and everything is cheap; I think I’ll stay here for as long as my visa allows” 3) the richer you are the least affected you get as tourists can’t compete with you all that easily 4) London has that other phenomena, which is not quite tourism, called mass immigration, and the last time I’ve heard about citizen actions towards the problem they were following the “we no longer want to participate in anything with out neighbors” path which is IMHO a bit more extreme than just being mad en masse with a relatively harmless protest.
From a political standpoint, Madrid is an oppressive mess. Catalonia is in the podium for the most productive region and this is killing it slowly (as it did with Portugal and parts of other countries). You can’t quite say the same about London. In London you might end up living far from the city center but your economic woes do not come from the thousands of immigrants nor the tourists all around.
Barcelona DOES have a unique reputation for these anti-tourist groups. That’s why I said Barcelona was unique. But it’s NOT unique in hosting large numbers of tourists. Not even close.
The literal exact same thing happens in every other alike place. We have the same in Lisbon.
The pieces of information foreigners get do not necessarily match the local truths.
As an example: I do volunteering at a kind-of-food-bank. It is obviously free to do. However, if you try to look that up in the internet, every single result will lead you to the idea that you need to have a guide or whatever reason to pay in order to do volunteering in here. The English information is HIGHLY distorted to hit foreigners. It is 100% unreliable. Do not attempt to look up for things about southern European countries in English. Most things that can somehow be capitalized on are lies or deceptive.
Okay. Well I’ve been to plenty of capital and major cities in London and Barcelona is the only place I’ve ever seen anti tourist stuff around and heard about this in the media. Granted, I’ve not been to Lisbon.
Random tweet I just came across: https://x.com/Scaife51/status/1811403266531471842?t=4fdIaowFfaHmYv77no51LQ
That’s this place: https://www.reddit.com/r/portugal/comments/1e1c4ky/why_albufeira_is_a_british_colony/
Can you realistically believe that one can live in there without being anti-tourist? That’s NOT a one off. That’s a very common occurrence in the south coast (both Portugal and Spain). It is not a major city or anything like that. Every city down there is currently like that.
I think it’s fair to say that football hooliganism is not unique to any particular place, and is a specific and unique problem. I do find football hooligans a nightmare. Is that the same problem as we’re discussing with general tourism? I would argue no. Football hooligans are horrible in their own countries too.
That’s an absolutely perfect example of what I’m saying. Whose fault is that - the individual who goes to that place, or the local government for approving those businesses to set themselves up on that street? If I lived there I would be furious. Not with the tourist spending money there, but with government for enabling the situation.
I’ve travelled around Spain and Italy (not Portugal, though I would love to visit one day) and I completely agree that it’s a shame when places are taken over by businesses that cater to tourists to the detriment of the authentic local culture. The first place that comes to mind for me is Amalfi in Italy, where this was by far the worst part about my visit there, despite it being an absolutely gorgeous part of the world.
Where we disagree is where the responsibility lies. I do not believe it’s the fault of the individual tourist. Local and national governments absolutely have the ability to change the situation. Obviously they don’t because tourism brings in so much money. I don’t particularly see how accosting and blaming individuals who have come to visit achieves anything or places blame on the people whose literal job it is to regulate these things.
Yes, over-tourism and hooligans are disjoint problems. But if it is so cheap going to a place that you can just grab your fella drunkards and go you end up mixing them both in…weird ways.
Britain is not that rich anymore (and we aren’t in 2011 anymore), however, during peak crisis (when the IMF rescued Portugal and almost had to do the same with Spain) we couldn’t do much besides accepting anything that was bringing money, no matter how little. For some reason, the brits got used to to go to Algarve as “their” vaction spot, so much that this predates the tourist boom, and at this point in time they just straight up bought everything. You can’t say no when your country is near bankrupt.
The 2008 financial crisis was a major turning point for this massified tourism. The “lazy southern people that don’t want to work” had to accept any money that tourists could bring and accept any consequences. Partly due to this, there’s this culture that tourists are immune to everything. If you think that hooligans are bad in a place with functioning cops, imagine them in a place that, at most, says “please don’t do that” and lets you go, every single time. Even the Germans, which generally are strict rule followers, stop having any regard for simple laws.
That very same “lazy southern people that don’t want to work” stereotype also got many people considering the northern Europeans to be entitled assholes. Not individually. There’s not all that much xenophobia when dealing with individuals 1:1, but when considering them as a group of people, there’s a lot of resentment. Germany, the UK and France being in crisis and facing the same problems we faced is giving some sweet sensation to a lot of people.
There’s also the cultural idea that “when you’re not in your town, you behave”, even internally. People from Oporto have the same prejudice towards Lisbon people. “They come here and act like this is their place, chanting and whatever, twats” goes Portuguese to Portuguese, no need to add foreigners for that attitude to be a thing.
There’s enough context to everything to write quite a few books. Nothing in these interactions are as simple as “people are annoyed at competition in their markets so they’re pointing water guns”.
There was the time period I just described where the governments could not have a say towards that + tragedy of commons. Every local government wants to have “the best behaved and richest tourists” so a race to the bottom it goes. Now it is a complete mess to fix the situation, especially since the Portuguese no longer own those places.
As a local government you can’t go against the majority of your people, and the majority of people in Algarve are Brits and French. They own entire regions. Years and years of this environment cause that. Even in the Lisbon region, plenty of tourists buy properties because “wow, such nice weather, everything cheap”, which they end up treating as investment because why wouldn’t them?
There was this particularly damning “golden visa” scheme during the IMF days where you’d get Portuguese citizenship and a myriad of rights if you invested 250k (?) in real estate. A whole lot of people started doing investment tourism due to that and they’re totally capitalizing on that.
The way I see it, there are two major classes of tourist in here. The rich fellas which bought the entire property market, with the richest of them tanking our water supplies with their golf courts and lobbying against any changes. And the bingo-card tourist which sees “50€ on Ryanair, nice! Honey, let’s go to Portugal, it is a place in Spain that has some pubs just like home”. You have a few other classes like the guys that actually enjoy discovering cultures and whatnot, but my personal experience tells me that there aren’t all that many like that even though all of them will say that they’re doing just that.
Now, none of this wall of text pointed at “firing water at people” as a solution; it just pointed a good deal of the context why other solutions are near impossible. However, in a way dissimilar to Portugal, Catalonia actually is a powerhouse. They can actually just limit the amount of people going there and succeed that way. But 1) business travellers are barely distinguishable from tourists 2) Madrid is a pain.
The whole point is that this is a very hard to solve mess. Most people don’t know these details; they merely know that we have a “too many tourists; go away” attitude; they could be halfway decent and just respect it, unless they have some particular interest in the country. There’s a trivial way to distinguish. We actually love to see people trying to speak Portuguese; even if they utterly fail; because this is enough to distinguish them from the 99%. This is how desperate we are for people that actually value anything in Portugal but the pictures and weather.