We’re being swamped by tourists, say leading cities

The crush of visitors in Europe’s overcrowded tourist spots is driving locals to distraction, said El País (Madrid). In Barcelona last week, hooded activists held up a tour bus at knifepoint, slashed its tyres and daubed its windscreen with the slogan, “tourism kill neighbourhoods”. They also posted videos online of themselves vandalising tourist bikes. Such abuses should not be tolerated; tourism may bring problems, but it also accounts for a fifth of all new jobs in Spain. The assailants were members of a radical party that’s propping up Catalonia’s pro-separatist regional government. Yet the local authorities seem to be turning a blind eye.

That’s because problems with tourism have reached a tipping point, said Stefan Kern in Rhein-neckar-zeitung (Heidelberg). Barcelona was put on the tourist map by the 1992 Olympics, and sought to boost visitor numbers following the 2008 global downturn. But the annual influx of more than 30 million tourists is causing huge upheaval. Traditional cafés and shops are being replaced by fast-food chains and souvenir stalls. Residents in the historic city centre have to negotiate an obstacle course of selfie snappers. For most, there’s no upside: their taxes pay for waste disposal and maintenance; the profits go to big tourism companies. Other cities fare even worse, said Sarah Koss in Profil (Vienna). Venice, with 265,000 residents, gets 30 million visitors a year. The Old Town in the Croatian port of Dubrovnik has 1,500 residents, yet hosts at least six times that number in tourists each day. In Barcelona, tourism is fuelling a house price boom, as landlords convert flats into Airbnb lets, driving up rents and pushing out long-time residents. In the city’s Old Town, there are three times more beds for tourists than for locals.

City authorities everywhere are fighting back, said Elizabeth Becker in Travel Weekly (Secaucus, New Jersey). Public squares in Florence are being hosed down regularly to stop tourists picnicking and leaving rubbish. Venice is closing fast-food outlets and plans to charge for entry to St Mark’s Square. Barcelona’s mayor, Ada Colau, was elected on a promise to slow the pace of tourism, and has imposed a temporary ban on new hotels, and closed down hundreds of unlicensed short-term rentals on Airbnb and Homeaway while fining their owners. Far from making her unpopular, many local complain she doesn’t go far enough: they want her to curb visits by cruise ships to Barcelona’s port (though she doesn’t have the power to do so). But at least Colau is addressing the central problem that other mayors must confront – finding a way to curb the excesses of tourism without “killing the golden goose”.