Mass tourism protesters squirt water at Barcelona tourists
bbc.com
bbc.com
[1] 2021: Barcelona started to recover, recording direct tourist spending of €3.7 billion with 4.5 million visitors. This marked a significant improvement as the city began reopening and international travel resumed.
[2] 2023: Tourists in Barcelona spent €9.6 billion in 2023, up 14.7% from 2019 More than 12 million people visited the Catalan capital last year, 6.9% less than four years ago. Employment and Job Creation: The tourism sector significantly contributes to employment in Barcelona. In 2023, the sector employed around 100,000 people, with nearly 130,000 contracts signed. Notably, more than half of these contracts were permanent, underscoring the sector's role in providing stable jobs .
[3] In fact, the entire tourism industry generates 12% of Catalonia's GDP and low-cost tourism is part of this.
[1] https://www.barcelona.cat/infobarcelona/en/tema/city-council... [2] https://www.catalannews.com/business/item/tourists-in-barcel... [3] https://www.catalannews.com/life-style/item/tourism-boom-in-...
Even given time, it's not obvious that Barcelona or Spain has the necessary pre-conditions to be globally competitive in another industry that would bring in the same amount of dollars per capita.
It's an extremely ambitious, all-hands-on-deck type of national undertaking to shoehorn your way into something. Japan did it with auto-manufacturing in the 30s. East Asia in general with high tech manufacturing.
I actually think this is better examined not as winners-losers, but costs-benefits, because most people will be experiencing both the “winning” side and the “losing” side simultaneously.
In "expat" groups foreigners complain we're rude and uninviting, but why wouldn't people be, we were perfectly fine before. Almost nobody here lives off tourism.
You don’t need to be directly receiving tourist dollars to benefit economically from tourism. Tourism can inject a significant amount of money into the local economy, which then circulates and supports business and employment outside of tourism.
(Of course, not all tourism is equal. Day visitors from cruise lines spend little money onshore, for example.)
Our quality of life worsens in exchange of nothing good for most of us.
This is strange framing, and apparently the opposite of my reality.
Tourism is seen as good, and this indicates there are bad sides, too.
Would be a logical step if your real goal is to attack the economy of the country. Foreign agents are getting short of ideas in the book it seems
Or surely I'm paranoid and some morning lots of people waked up as a single organism with the genius idea of stopping tourism harassing people and squirting water on them and their cameras and phones, just because
We have seen before variants of the "is just water haha" stunt used on politicians.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADrXpW33RNk
A seemingly innocuous zero legal consequences method to spread paranoia if needed, or Legionella if convenient. Specially if you can convince a bunch of useful idiots to provide lots of cover for you.
Also used by idiots to torment a political opponent.
https://www.epdata.es/evolucion-emigracion-inmigracion-comun...
"The most-visited region of Spain was Catalonia, with 18 million foreign visitors. Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia." "The coastal city alone, with its many internationally famous sites such as La Sagrada Familia, received more than 12 million tourists last year." https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-09/why-are-people-protes...
40K net immigration/year is much smaller than 18 million.
Even if those 18 million are in Catalonia for only a day, that's still 49K people.
Tourism in Catalonia has increased a lot over the last couple of decades.
"1,159,905 tourists/persons stayed at hotels in Catalonia in 2023 according the Spanish Statistics Institute (INE). This is 6.98% over 2022 figures 1,085,088, and 2.4% over 2019 figures 1,132,586 persons." says https://www.barcelonayellow.com/barcelona-faq/1197-how-many-... .
Clearly 12 million tourists who visited Barcelona is far more than the 1 million who stayed at hotels in Catalonia, but we'll look at just the hotel numbers.
1,159,905 - 1,085,088 = 74,817
That means an increase by 75K tourists in the last year, compared to a net immigration of 40K.
And that's only those at hotels. Even if the tourism population increases by only 1% each year that's still 120K additional people per year, which is 3x that of the net immigration change, and still larger than the total number of new immigrants.
Where did the other tourists stay? Clearly AirB&B, which competes with local housing, but some also came by cruise ship, which does not.
Also, I strongly suspect "Emigrantes" and "Inmigrantes" refers to people moving in and out of Catalonia, which would include people moving there from Madrid. Your source didn't give the number of immigrants specifically from Africa.
However the numbers they do give show there is no way the number of African immigrants, including their Spanish born children, are enough to make the increasing number of tourists each year in Catalonia be "a drop in the water" by comparison.
All population information I can find says your seemingly racist viewpoint is not backed by any evidence that it's a significant contribution.
Would you have preferred "xenophobic", "nativist", or "bigoted" instead?
No non-Moroccan African countries were even on that list of immigrant populations in Catalonia.
I checked with https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racismo_cultural and indeed even in Spanish "racism" does not specifically require "race":
> El racismo cultural, también denominado «neoracismo» o «racismo diferencial», es una forma de racismo surgida después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial en la que la identificación de los grupos humanos no se basa en sus rasgos biológicos (en la «raza», un concepto deslegitimado después de 1945) sino en su cultura, estableciendo una jerarquía de culturas «superiores» e «inferiores» como en el viejo racismo científico.
So why are you making irrelevant comments which imply you support a racist?
No one is making more places to visit.
For example Gary, Indiana. You only hear the bad things, but never that it has great beaches and trails, if you're willing to settle for a bit less on everything else. Here's a video I took a few months ago https://imgur.com/PItmK2v, I don't think people necessarily picture these sort of views from the armpit of Indiana but it's a daily reality here.
Wow that's really interesting! Cool video, too.
Last time I visited, I felt an overwhelming anxiety that Rome didn't exist anymore. Instead I was walking through an amusement park shaped like it.
Friends I spoke to, who live in the Alban Hills, told me they'd stopped going to Rome 10 years earlier. Which is insane because she can trace her family in Rome proper to the 16th century.
Maybe in someone's ideal world we can put everyone in a city into the categories of "outsiders" and "residents" and enforce a strict regime where "outsiders" are strictly prohibited from occupying housing that rightfully should go to "residents", but we don't live in a world where that's possible.
If Airbnb didn't exist someone else would have come up with it. If somehow the idea was preemptively disallowed, then the complaint would be that there are too many hostels operating under-the-table.
Without building more housing, there is nothing you can fundamentally do about tourism except make Barcelona a worse place, in comparison to everywhere else, for everyone.
Airbnb has turned me into a traveller because they disrupted the hotel industry. When a city bans airbnb, they are banning me from visiting.
Build it and they will come.
Back then was mostly Western tourists, and maybe a smattering of other folks. Now much of Asia has caught up, as has Eastern Europe and parts of MENA. Volume has just increased.
Cheapo flights like RyanAir + cheapo accommodations like AirBnB also make it feasible for less well off folks to travel. Again, just spiking the volume.
Sooner or later, this trend will ramp up globally since the premise was to rent a spare room, not the whole thing. Tourism will survive since Barcelona has been a hot destination long before short-term rentals.
Like I get being upset if you feel you are being priced out of your home city, but why place the hate/blame on the tourists? As a tourist I'm trying to enjoy the city and culture and earn money for the residents, not cause societal issues for the residents. If there is an accommodation available for me to book then I will book it because I assume I am welcome. Why not protest the politicians who are deciding the policies?
The “blame politicians” is a terrible approach. In a democracy politicians are elected by a majority of people. If people actually wanted to end tourism in large enough numbers, someone would elections on an anti-tourism platform.
But also, Being mad at tourists seems weird to me. These are people who want to come and experience your city, learn about your culture, pay to eat food at your restaurants. Buy local art, have gelato with you.
If your gripe is increased housing costs (which it almost always is) The problem is not tourists. The problem is short term rentals are more profitable than renting to locals (the fact is it pays 5x as much so property owners will do it if allowed). Go squirt the mayor and demand he accelerate banning short term rentals. Give him a second squirt and ask him to accelerate permitting new housing construction while he’s at it.
Tourists bring money to your city. They pay your wages, they elevate the economy. Embrace them and make rules to prevent them from damaging the city they’re coming to experience. Don’t shout at them.
Even if I don't work in those industries? And what about the places where this money came from, and could have been spent?
Point being, tourism isn't all good for all people. There are tradeoffs.
Depends on your definition of "good". If by good, you mean an increase in economic activity and therefore wealth, then yes tourism can certainly benefit that. Let's just look myopically at restaurants. All things being equal, if no tourism existed in Barcelona versus its current form, then restaurants would not be operating at their current capacity. Even if let's say this meant all restaurants could continue to operate (e.g. didn't fire anyone), but at like 50% operating capacity, it would mean no restaurant owner could profit enough to invest profits into new decor, new capital equipment, better cooking materials, etc. All of those service providers now suffer and will hit economic hardships. Those people now have less to spend on food, housing, etc.
The issue is not short-term rental, the issue is too much short-term rental.
+1, squirting the tourists who are already there does little to discourage other tourists from coming, or to solve the problem that they're competing for the same housing.
That said, I can't help but think that AirBnB(/VRBO/etc...) is just faster to respond to market conditions than traditional hotel businesses because it leverages already built private residences. If land is 5x as profitable as accommodation for tourists, then anywhere where a hotel could be built the value of the land will increase, and thus housing costs. I guess the local govt. has zoning as a lever it can use to restrict where hotels can be built though. Maybe that's the point though, that AirBnB sidesteps zoning, extracting more value from the land than other users can.
It's faster because it breaks the law. It's easy to react quickly if you don't bother paying taxes and ignore rules on subletting, etc. It remove a lot of work.
> AirBnB sidesteps zoning
It's not side stepping anything it's often breaking the law, or at least encouraging other people to do so.
sure, price fixed algorithm based corporate landlords are a problem to address. and there are some people that will propose an even higher rent to ensure they get to be a tenant.
but random people who were unilaterally told a price and saw it fit in their budget? that's not really the target
> Plus how do they know those are tourists and not native Spaniards?
The air-bnb tourists, I think, are less noticeable. There's certainly a lot of them but they are distributed around the city and they tend to NOT group together to mob any one place. These tourists are likely to avoid the standard "tourist traps".
Which type of tourist is the kind that inspires resentment from natives? I'm not so sure. The air-bnb tourists, in large-enough numbers, can cause rents to jack-up and THAT certainly hurts the locals. The tour-bus crowds, on the other hand, are more obvious and certainly change the optics of certain places. This eventually leads to the swallowing up of whole blocks with baubble shops and bad restaurants-- but only in certain contained areas and at certain times.
Perhaps if people were spending €8 at Abuela Rosa's Tortas instead of €6 at Taco Bell, a Yum! Brands experience brought to you by TriBrands Global the locals would be more welcoming.
I suspect the protestors feel like they are the ones being disturbed.
When people say they "bring money in", worth seeing where the money goes. Tourists spend in the most scammy cynical price gouging businesses and in multinationals. The profit margins of these businesses is not local wealth - the financial impact locals see is property price inflation. In most tourist cities, you don't need to walk far from the main attraction to see desperate poverty.
There is opportunity cost. When a political administration leans into the "tourist industry" they are not growing other industry and enterprise that creates high value jobs for locals. The jobs tourism creates are entry level service workers that will likely served by immigrants also attracted by the same dynamics as tourists and more easily exploited by a loathsome industry.
(Admittedly, Barcelona seems to have about 20 million overnight stays plus cruise ships, but it also has almost three times the population of Duesseldorf)
In fact, in my jurisdiction this would be common assault.
Also, "rich tourists"... On the contrary. The number of tourists across Europe has exploded because very cheap flights and available and cheap accommodation means that, for instance, spending a couple of days in Barcelona has become extremely cheap and affordable to all, and all can be arranged from one's smartphone, indeed. When tourism was only for "rich people" there was no problem at all and Tom Ripley was very welcome everywhere ;)
Example: Ryanair has flights from London to Perpignan (in France, across the border from Barcelona) in July starting at £35 one way... Barcelona seems more in demand so it's a whole £65...
In most jurisdictions, it'd be both a) assault and b) something the cops wouldn't give a shit about unless it damages a laptop or something.
For a squirt gunning? They aren’t gonna do shit.
I have called the police twice in recent years, once for a road traffic accident in my street and once for road rage and they showed up in under 5 minutes (UK). It's not possible to generalise, but I suspect that a report of an assault in progress should get a quick response (maybe don't mention the water guns too much ;) )
Sure, but you could say this about every form of protest.
>On the contrary.
Poor people are not spending two days in Barcelona on a whim.
Richer people go to cruises or rent cars for a few weeks. Source: me and my friends when we were younger.
But that’s not as visible. And nothing new.
https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/europe/europeans-angry...
Mortgage financing and infrastructure, at least here in Canada, was designed to help get people into home ownership. Over the past 10 years that's turned into cheap, easy leverage to become a landlord.
I wouldn’t call it “designed to” if it was more accessible to those with large amounts of capital already at their disposal.