- Led by the Assemblea de Barris pel Decreixement Turístic, or the Neighborhood Meeting for Tourism Degrowth, the protesters listed 13 calls for in a manifesto revealed Saturday, together with restrictions on vacationer lodging, fewer cruise terminals within the metropolis’s port and an finish to tourism ads utilizing public funds.
- Native authorities estimated 2,800 folks participated within the protests. Daniel Pardo Rivacoba, 48, a member of the organizing group, mentioned as many as 20,000 folks from 170 organizations took half within the protests.
- Rivacoba mentioned the usage of water weapons was a spontaneous determination made by particular person protesters and was not advised by organizers. “Receiving water in your face just isn’t good, however it’s not violent,” he mentioned.
- Responding to rising considerations, Barcelona Mayor Jaume Collboni pledged Saturday to order 10,000 residential items normally utilized by vacationers for native residents and improve taxes on vacationers, amongst different measures.
Barcelona has lengthy been a well-liked vacationer vacation spot. Final 12 months, near 26 million visited the area, in line with official figures, and Spain was the second-most visited nation on the earth, in line with U.N. Tourism. Barcelona’s inhabitants is 1.7 million.
Together with Venice, it is the place the backlash in opposition to overtourism started, mentioned T.C. Chang, a professor of geography on the Nationwide College of Singapore who researches city tourism.
“So far as I do know, there was no express violence. However [overtourism] was already acknowledged no less than 2-3 years earlier than the pandemic,” he mentioned in an e-mail, noting that residents have additionally put up “No vacationers welcome” indicators in neighborhoods. “What has occurred in Barcelona will unfold to extra tourist-crowded locations past Europe,” he added.
Barcelona just isn’t alone in its discontent with guests. Locales in Japan, Indonesia, Greece, Italy and the Netherlands have additionally taken steps to curb influxes previously 12 months.
In Japan, one city sought to put in an enormous display at a well-liked photograph spot in entrance of Mount Fuji to cease vacationers from taking selfies and inflicting visitors jams. Final 12 months, the Greek authorities imposed a brand new timed ticketing system for the traditional Acropolis, a UNESCO World Heritage website, together with a customer cap of 20,000 folks per day. Venice experimented with extracting additional charges from vacationers, whereas Amsterdam restricted the development of latest inns.
“I believe the important thing level right here is about sustainable tourism improvement and sustainable administration of vacationer flows inside a rustic,” mentioned J.J. Zhang, a tourism geographer at Nanyang Technological College in Singapore.
As a doable answer, Zhang advised figuring out the capability of common websites and controlling visitors, resembling by “utilizing expertise the place real-time information might be communicated to vacationers such that overcrowded locations may very well be averted,” he mentioned.
However Bob McKercher, a professor on tourism on the College of Queensland in Australia, raised one other subject: The vast majority of vacationers worldwide are home. “So whereas overtourism could also be a long-standing subject,” he mentioned, “can you actually cease folks from visiting their very own nation?”
Beatriz Ríos contributed to this report.
