||| FROM COUNTERPUNCH |||
A crowd of 3,000 anti-tourism protesters descended on posh downtown Barcelona last July, their demeanor one of delighted malice. They cordoned off hotels and eateries with hazard tape, as if demarcating a crime scene. They sprayed with water guns the blithe holidaymakers seated in restaurants. Video footage showed unhappy couples and glowering young men chased from their seats by the mob, stunned at the indignity.
The protesters shouted “tourists go home.” They held signs that said “Barcelona is not for sale.” They spoke of “mass touristification” and inveighed against the greed of restaurateurs and hoteliers and Airbnb landlords profiting from the madding crowd while the average Catalan struggled to meet the skyrocketing costs of daily life. One of the protesters told an interviewer, “The city has turned completely for tourists. What we want is a city for citizens.”
The revolt in Spain — resident population 47 million; yearly visitation 85 million — is no outlier in the hypervisited destination countries of Europe. In Greece and Italy, for example, residents also rose up this year to say they will accept no more the invasion of their native ground, as mass visitation strains to the breaking point infrastructure, natural resources – especially water – and, at last, social sanity.
It’s the culmination of years of exploitation and maltreatment, said writer Chris Christou, who produces “The End of Tourism” podcast. “In the last decade, especially in southern Europe,” Christou told me in an email, “we’ve seen local movements sprout and mobilize —typically from the grassroots Left — against the relentless conversion of home into a veritable theme park for ignorant foreigners.” Christou has documented the industry’s long train of offenses: environmental degradation; cultural appropriation and what he calls petrification (“the stasis or congealing of culture’s flow or growth”); spiraling economic inequality; the Airbnbization of dwelling; gentrification and displacement; corporate and government nepotism; the revolving door of corruption between tourism bureaus and industry; the rise of an extremely precarious labor force; and, not least, “the spectacled surveillance of place that effectively turns home, for local residents, into a turnstile Disneyland.”
Mainstream media during the summer figured out there was a story here. In the New York Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg, Forbes, and Reuters, the scourge of “overtourism” made headlines for the first time. The images of thronged locales published across the web and in newspapers had the quality of Hieronymous Bosch’s paintings of hell: people piling on one another, grasping, motioning, their forms indistinguishable, as the newly empowered consumers of the burgeoning global middle-class swarm across Earth in record numbers.
There is no end in sight to this growth, as it appears to be the norm of fossil-fueled footloose modernity. In 1950 there were 25 million international tourist arrivals. Twenty years later the number had jumped to 166 million, by 1990 it was 435 million, and by 2018 it hit an all-time pre-Covid high of 1.442 billion. By 2030, almost 2 billion tourist arrivals are projected.
In Barcelona, the big money is not in maintaining a city for citizens but in the flux of Boschian creatures. Some 26 million visitors crammed into Barcelona in 2023 and spent nearly $14 billion. The Barcelona city council and the Catalan government dedicate millions of tax-payer euros to ensure this continual flow through global marketing campaigns that sing the city’s praises.
The pressures from hyper-visitation and the greed of those who profit from it have become so great that residents have formed the Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth, whose purpose is to reverse the toxic touristification process. The group’s co-founder, 48-year-old Barcelonan Daniel Pardo, described touristification as “a transformation enacted on a territory and a population” by governments in collusion with commercial interests. He believes that degrowth of tourism means regulating it nearly out of existence.
“It means not only regulating tourism markets but promoting other activities in order to reduce the weight of tourism in the economy of the city,” Pardo told me. Most important is the recognition of the almost pathological dependence on tourism in Barcelona and the many places like it. The city has been shown to be painfully vulnerable to any unexpected crisis that upends travel patterns.
“It happened with Covid,” said Pardo, “happened before that with a terrorist attack, and before that with a volcanic explosion in Iceland.” And it will happen, sooner or later, because of the climate crisis and unleashed geopolitical chaos. “Better than keeping on the tourism wheel, which smashes lives, territory and environment, let’s plan a transition process for Barcelona which reduces this risky dependance,” Pardo told me. “How? Not easy to say, since nobody is trying that almost anywhere.”
One place to start is with the ideological error in how we think of leisure travel as a right rather than a privilege.
“The right to fly does not exist. The right to tourism does not exist,” said Pardo recently on the End of Tourism podcast. “You cannot extend a model of tourism everybody thinks about to all the population. It’s impossible.” Pardo added in an email to me that the central issue is “about the limits of the planet, something so many people absolutely do not want to hear about.”
The tourism explosion can reasonably be explained by the IPAT math formula used in the ecological sciences. Intended to measure how endless growth of modern industrial civilization strains a finite Earth, the formula states that impact equals population times affluence times technology.
With IPAT in mind, one could argue that too many would-be travelers with newly acquired affluence have access to new technologies. Easy online bookings and guides, smartphones in general for facilitating and smoothing the travel experience, high-quality digital photography and video equipment made available for use by amateurs on social media, with its influencers driving place-based envy and desire — all this combines in a noxious stew on an overpopulated planet of societies abased by lust for money.
“. . . a noxious stew on an overpopulated planet of societies abased by lust for money.” Wow! Ouch! Well-put, though! (Retired 25-year innkeeper/kayak guide here!)
People are curious and will come no matter what.
One quiet morning wearing my birthday suit while on Waldron I was shaving when I hear noises outside below. Ipeeked out the window and there stood two couples at our door. Seeing me (my head) one called up,”Can we come in and look around?” I said it was an inconvenient time, and they drifted back down our path.
Jonathan Swiftian acid gets one nowhere. It put him in an asylum. Regulation of sorts, maybe. A booklet of island expectations would make more sense. Waldron has for new property owners . I recommend one for tourists. Because no matter what you do, they will come. Let’s be civilized, but be clear.
You miss the point. It’s not about one or two tourists trespassing where they don’t belong, (and you know this). It’s about a policy that continues to promote for more when we already have to many. Tourism is not a problem… overtouiism is, (did you not read the article).
As always Mr. Appel, the WISDOM of common sense.
(Brevity: I get a message that a minimum of 60 characters is needed to post this, so here we are)
Common sense tells us, just as the Aspen / Nantucket Report forewarned us decades ago, that if we don”t change the direction that we’re going that we’re going to turn out no different than the place where I moved here from, and from the places that were named in the article. We’re already there, it’s just that there are some who refuse to see it. “Willful ignorance” is the term that comes to mind.
If “People are curious and will come no matter what” is what you deem is common sense, then common sense might also say that we don’t need to spend so much effort, energy, and money on promoting for more.
Recommending “A booklet of island expectations would make more sense,” is something that the county already does in their stewardship plan. The mention of it is merely comparing apples to oranges, (Bill fully knows this but is trying to minimize and sideline the real issue).
If stating, “Because no matter what you do, they will come” is what you consider common sense, then again, common sense might also say that we don’t need to spend as much money and energy promoting for more as we do.
Did you read the article Phil? Do you not see the parallels between here, Madrid, and (if you read the whole article) Moab? Do you not believe that overtourism is unhealthy for small communities, or perhaps you make money off of it and just don’t care. Which is it?
Inquiring minds want to know… do you yourself have anything to say that would even come close to bordering common sense?
I’d like to promote the word “we” in these discussions. Use of the word “you” may be cathartic, but it draws people apart at the very time, and on the very issues, we need to discuss this together to arrive at a solution no one will say is perfect but all except extremists (for which there is no cure) will say provides a balance that brings us together, not apart.
You can promote whatever you want. I was talking to Phil.
Taking the “whatever happens will happen” approach that you champion Bill may sound like wisdom and common sense to the good old boys, the property rights advocates, the realtors, the visitors bureau, the vacation rental crowd, and the investment minded, but it reeks of the resignation of the status quo… hardly a solution seeking approach. It is just the opposite. It serves to minimize the issues that are relative to the debate, and is akin to burying one’s head in the sand.