Barcelona residents took to the streets this weekend and visited some of its most popular sights, shooting tourists with water guns and telling them to go back home.
Organizers said the demonstration was a reminder of the “discomfort that is in Barcelona” due to mass tourism. The city has blamed this influx of foreigners for driving up the cost of living and housing, which has been pushing locals out.
Euronews also said that the collapse at Porta Naples marked how higher tourist numbers — about 12 million a year in the city, many of them cruise ship visitors — have placed health services under strain as well as waste management and water supplies.
Naturally, Barcelona’s Mayor Jaume Collboni was not going to take this lying down and has revealed a plan that will see all of the city’s circa 10,000 short-term rentals cease in 2028. But housing activists say this will just create space for new hotels.
Barcelona now joins the list of large European cities that have been overwhelmed by tourism.
On the Canary Islands, just off the coast of Africa but owned by Spain, activists have gone on a hunger strike to prevent the building of new hotels, the BBC reported. The organizers abandoned the protest after 20 days, determining that officials had “zero interest” in their well-being, but construction briefly halted due to concerns over environmental breaches.
Last year, Florence banned new short-term rentals. These short term rentals are defined as homes that allow less than one month occupancy.
In sharp contrast, locals have begun “living in apartment hotels” as Nardella recorded the number of Airbnb listings more than doubled from 6,000 to over 14,000 within just five years.
In Venice, angry officials introduced a 5 euro “day-trippers” fee to the city center. Critics say this fee hasn’t curbed tourism and has only bolstered the city’s bottom line, without increasing the number of available apartments.
“It is a further advance toward the Venice that we do not want, the ‘museum city,’ a step toward the normalization of this image, which is all the more dangerous the more it enters the international imagination,” Susanna Polloni, from the Venice-based Solidarity Network for Housing, told reporters.
“This measure will help make it even more concretely real,” Polloni continued. “A city empty of residents and soul, given that the tourist monoculture is now devouring everything needed for the life of a city: housing, protected employment, public services, neighborhood shops and crafts.”
