In a combination of caprice and frustration, 1000’s of Barcelona residents turned against mass tourism on Saturday. They were armed with an unusual weapon: the water pistol.
The Las Ramblas district – a well-liked tourist attraction – was transformed into an improvised water park as protesters aimed water guns at unsuspecting tourists having fun with their meal outdoors.
Video recordings of CNN shows two boys limping away from a water pistol attack with an ice cream of their hands. Another woman with wet hair scurries awkwardly away from the barrage as protesters shout at her and fellow tourists to “go home.”
While the protest methods could also be light-hearted, the protesters’ feelings weren’t. The Assemblea de Barris pel Decreixement Turístic (ABDT), which had organised the protest (but Assets that the water pistols were spontaneous) argue that residents “suffer directly from the record influx of tourists” that visit town yearly.
Since the pandemic, tourists have visited the historic city in record numbers – in 2023 there have been 23 million Visitors stayed overnight in Barcelona, dwarfing town’s 1.62 million residents. These visitors also spent 12.75 billion euros (13.8 billion dollars), which is about 15% of town’s revenue, in response to Barcelona City Council.
But the ABDT argues that the typical citizen doesn’t profit from these gains, but is as a substitute faced with rising housing costs, precarious working conditions and a lower quality of life.
living costs
Rent prices within the Spanish city have risen by 68% during the last decade, while the fee of shopping for a house has increased by 38%. after to Jaume Collboni, Barcelona’s mayor. He and other city council officials blame the explosion of town’s short-term rental marketplace for the rising costs.
Last month, Collboni announced during a city council press conference that short-term rentals of housing through Airbnb could be banned in town by November 2028. The measure would make about 10,101 apartments available for long-term rental.
“We are facing what we consider to be Barcelona’s biggest problem,” Collboni said on the event, adding that the inexpensive housing crisis has hit young people specifically and has turn into a significant factor in inequality in town.
Mayor Ada Colau, who served for eight years before Collboni – and who had a history as a left-wing activist before taking office – also took a series of measures to curb short-term rentals. These measures include limiting the variety of hotel beds allowed in town, banning recent hotels within the historic center and requiring landlords who need to rent out their apartments through Airbnb to use for a tourist license through town hall.
“Barcelona tried to implement a bold strategy,” Anna Torres-Delgadoa research fellow and expert on Barcelona tourism on the University of Surrey, said online magazine Reasons to be glad“In some ways it was useful and worked well in the historic center.”
However, the protesters say that these measures are usually not enough. A spokesman for the ABDT said Assets that Collboni’s policy is solely to change from apartment rentals to hotels, which “are also built on residential buildings, so the problem remains.” The spokesman also accused Collboni of attempting to favor hotels which might be “historically linked to” the mayor’s Socialist Party of Catalonia.
Among other things, the rules of the ABDT apply manifest calls for the closure of holiday homes and a ban on the development of further short-term rental apartments.
Pandemic isolation
During the COVID-19 pandemic, town suffered from falling visitor numbers. Bars, shops and restaurants closed their doors as one of the vital economic sectors – tourism – stalled, which debate that town needed to diversify its economy.
This is an element of the ABDT’s argument. The group’s spokesperson said the pandemic has hit Barcelona’s tourist districts “much harder” and that specialization in tourism makes town extremely vulnerable to quite a few problems comparable to “pandemics, geopolitical changes, terrorism, tourism trends and so on.”
However, the peace and quiet also offered residents the chance to rediscover their city.
“We don’t want life to be like it was during the pandemic, but it has also given us the chance to see that there are other possibilities without mass tourism,” said Martí Cusó, who lives within the Gothic Quarter, Barcelona’s busiest tourist area. The guard.
“My neighborhood is so full of tourists that it is impossible to meet anyone on the street, that children cannot play and that it is not even possible for them to sleep well,” he says, adding that the pandemic has offered a “missed” opportunity to rethink town.
However, most residents have a positive attitude towards tourism, in response to town council report.Perception of tourism in Barcelona 2023“About 70.9% of individuals imagine that tourism advantages town, a rise of 4% in comparison with 2022.
But even those that recognized that tourism was crucial to Barcelona’s economy were disillusioned by the influx of travelers, the report said.
“More and more people believe that Barcelona has reached its capacity for tourism,” it says.
