From the New York Times news section:
Squirt Guns and ‘Go Home’ Signs: Barcelona Residents Take Aim at Tourists
Locals confronted visitors to the Catalan capital in a whimsical (but very serious) demonstration against mass tourism and housing shortages.
By Amelia Nierenberg and Rachel Chaundler
Amelia Nierenberg reported from London and Rachel Chaundler from Zaragoza, Spain.July 10, 2024
For the last few months, tourists in certain areas of Spain have found fewer welcome mats and more hostility. Anti-tourism graffiti loops across buildings, and tens of thousands of people have protested this year against unsustainable mass tourism.
Over the weekend in Barcelona, locals’ anger over housing shortages, overcrowding and the cost of living was tangible—and wet.
Residents of the Catalan capital took to the streets on Saturday with water guns, squirting them at diners eating al fresco.
About 2,800 people demonstrated, the police said, a figure that some organizers said was an undercount. Some carried signs with messages like “tourists go home” and “you are not welcome,” and doused families at restaurants….
The protesters and their supporters say that the demand for short-term housing is exacerbating an increasingly unaffordable rental market. The mayor, Jaume Collboni, announced plans last month to get rid of all short-term housing by late 2028. He called it the city’s “largest problem.”
Mr. Petzold suggested that some of the anger was misplaced, citing a high number of expatriates and digital nomads, who bring higher salaries to the competitive rental market.
“These people have more impact on the city and everything than the actual tourists,” he said. “This blame on the tourists is a bit cheap.”
And, locals say, tourists are everywhere, crowding monuments, streets and restaurants. In catering to them, locals say, businesses end up selling a bland simulation of Barcelona (paella and sangria, anyone?) that could overtake the city’s genuine character.
When I spent six weeks backpacking around Europe in 1980, I never bothered to visit Spain. But in Switzerland, an Australian bloke told me he’d just been in Barcelona and could hear a loud racket in the distance. He finally wandered over in that direction and was told by leaving Anglophone tourists that he’d just missed a free outdoor concert by The Clash.
Granted, I can’t find any evidence online that The Clash ever played Barcelona before 1981, when they were past their London Calling primes.
Commenter Altai4 writes:
But Gurun and Solomon might be onto something when it comes to explaining what’s going on in the United States. They suggest that if people prefer (whether consciously or unconsciously) to marry a member of their own race, the higher the percentage of people of their own race they meet, the more likely they are to find Mr./Miss Right, and the sooner that happy day is to arrive.
I’ve made this same point before. It’s a kind of habitat fragmentation. *In the voice of Adam Curtis* It has a name, social pollution. This is a term which is used quite a lot in academia for all sorts of things but the most precise one I have seen comes from the very progressive and very concerned with the negative impacts mass tourism has for locals field of Tourism Studies. In the context of Tourism Studies, “social pollution” is often used to describe the effects of large numbers of tourists have in preventing an area or environment from being of social use of the natives, in effect the tourists are a pollution that damages the local culture from functioning. Similarly the search for friends, acquaintances and mates is soured by the social pollution of immigration as is the natural functioning and expression of the pre-existing culture.
Now quite a lot of things from the very progressive and perfectly politically correct field of Tourism Studies and the concept of “Over-Tourism” sound suspiciously like the gripes people have about immigrants except applying to tourists. See this opinion piece, replacing every instance of tourist with immigrant seems pretty much to discuss the same thing. But one is acceptable to complain about and one isn’t. This despite the fact that tourists don’t make the same claims on the host society that immigrants do.
Imagine an immigrant writing this piece of self-criticism.
“I don’t travel like that,” you might say, and of course, no single visitor can be held to account for unsustainable tourism plans or badly-managed development.
But still, what is ‘mass tourism’ if not a mass of single visitors?
It’s unavoidable: The problem is us.
Each man kills the thing he loves, as Oscar Wilde wrote. We have a right to see the world, but the way we do it needs to change. Growth needs to work for locals first.
In fact the very term “Over-Tourism” is a great term to appropriate in the immigration debate, “Over-Immigration” immediately puts the onus on the immigration boosters to either deny the obvious fact that there is for everyone a limit to where immigration goes beyond toleration or accept that this point exists but that, somehow, we haven’t reached it yet. From there you can debate all the negative consequences and lack of any positives to anyone but immigrants themselves and those who use them to lower wages.
