- 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 commercials utilizing public funds.
- Native authorities estimated 2,800 individuals participated within the protests. Daniel Pardo Rivacoba, 48, a member of the organizing group, stated as many as 20,000 individuals from 170 organizations took half within the protests.
- Rivacoba stated the usage of water weapons was a spontaneous choice made by particular person protesters and was not instructed by organizers. “Receiving water in your face is just not good, but it surely’s not violent,” he stated.
- Responding to rising issues, 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 preferred vacationer vacation spot. Final yr, near 26 million visited the area, based on official figures, and Spain was the second-most visited nation on the earth, based on U.N. Tourism. Barcelona’s inhabitants is 1.7 million.
Together with Venice, it is the place the backlash towards overtourism started, stated 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 specific violence. However [overtourism] was already acknowledged at the very least 2-3 years earlier than the pandemic,” he stated in an electronic 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 is just not alone in its discontent with guests. Locales in Japan, Indonesia, Greece, Italy and the Netherlands have additionally taken steps to curb influxes up to now yr.
In Japan, one city sought to put in an enormous display screen at a preferred photograph spot in entrance of Mount Fuji to cease vacationers from taking selfies and inflicting visitors jams. Final yr, 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 individuals per day. Venice experimented with extracting additional charges from vacationers, whereas Amsterdam restricted the development of latest lodges.
“I believe the important thing level right here is about sustainable tourism improvement and sustainable administration of vacationer flows inside a rustic,” stated J.J. Zhang, a tourism geographer at Nanyang Technological College in Singapore.
As a doable answer, Zhang instructed figuring out the capability of well-liked websites and controlling visitors, corresponding to by “utilizing expertise the place real-time information may be communicated to vacationers such that overcrowded locations could possibly be averted,” he stated.
However Bob McKercher, a professor on tourism on the College of Queensland in Australia, raised one other concern: The vast majority of vacationers worldwide are home. “So whereas overtourism could also be a long-standing concern,” he stated, “can you actually cease individuals from visiting their very own nation?”
Beatriz Ríos contributed to this report.
