Around 3,000 protesters marched on Saturday in Barcelona to denounce mass tourism and its effect on Spain’s most visited city, with some angry locals even spraying water on tourists in nearby restaurants.
Under the slogan ‘Enough! Let’s put limits on tourism’, some 2,800 people, according to police, marched along a waterfront district of Barcelona to demand a new economic model that would reduce the millions of tourists that visit every year.
With banners saying ‘Reduce tourism now!’, the protesters chanted slogans such as ‘Tourists out of our neighbourhood’, stopping in front of hotels to the surprise of visitors.
A video of the demo shared by several media outlets shows a small number of protesters spraying tourists with water pistols and directing angry chants their way, forcing some to leave the bars and restaurants they were sat at on Barcelona’s famous boulevard of La Rambla.
Protesters also ‘cordoned off’ several restaurants where holidaymakers were with striped crime scene tape.
Barcelona’s rising cost of housing, up 68% in the past decade according to local authorities, is one of the main issues for the movement, along with the effects of tourism on local commerce and working conditions in the city of 1.6 million inhabitants.
The Catalan capital of Barcelona, with internationally famous sites such as La Sagrada Familia, received more than 12 million tourists last year, according to local authorities.
To combat the ‘negative effects of mass tourism’, the city council run by the socialist mayor Jaume Collboni announced 10 days ago that it was banning tourist apartment rentals – there are now more than 10,000 – by 2028 so that they can be put back on the local housing market. ALSO READ: Spanish government to limit short-term rentals and tourist flats to address housing crisis.
The announcement could lead to a legal battle and is opposed by an association of tourist apartments who say it will just feed the black market.
The Barcelona protests come after similar demonstrations in tourist hotspots such as Málaga, Palma de Mallorca and the Canary Islands.
The second most visited country after France, Spain received 85 million foreign visitors in 2023, an increase of 18.7% from the previous year, according to the National Statistics Institute (INE).
The most visited region was Catalonia, whose capital is Barcelona, with 18 million, followed by the Balearic Islands (14.4 million) and the Canary Islands (13.9 million).
Mass tourism protesters squirt water at Barcelona tourists https://t.co/vy2HLCdXD3
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) July 7, 2024
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