Often, we forget the tourism industry is just that: an industry. We can’t accept our wanderlust is one of its raw materials, or that our cherished memories are being passed through an enormous, highly immersive machine. In the past 40 years, this machine has changed the world. Florence has become an impassable mass of sunburnt flesh. “Content creators” are transforming Bali into a tropical Clapham. Even Everest is now just a long, dangerous, toiletless queue for Earth’s most expensive selfie.
Daniel Pardo Rivacoba moved to Barcelona 18 years ago. In that time, he’s seen it become almost unliveable. Short-term flats have spiked monthly rents to 110 per cent of the average young person’s salary. Every year, the city’s 1.6m residents are besieged by roughly 31m visitors. “The market specialises in the tourism sector, which has among the lowest wages and worst working conditions in the economy,” Rivacoba says. “Then you have the disappearance of the shops needed for daily life, replaced by services that are absolutely useless to the population.” He calls this process “touristification”.
Recently, Rivacoba has spent an unexpectedly long time discussing water pistols. In the summer, angry Barcelonians took to the streets and some began squirting tourists on La Rambla, a thoroughfare leading to the port where 800 or so cruise ships dock annually to unload 3.5m passengers. Angry headlines followed and Rivacoba, a spokesperson for the Assembly of Neighbourhoods for Tourism Degrowth (ABDT), has been busy calming the press. “We don’t care about water guns… It’s a photo,” he says. “People in Barcelona are aware that tourists are not responsible for what’s happening. It’s the tourism industry and public administration.” The message “Tourists go home” has become ubiquitous on the walls and shutters of Barcelona. Ironically, the hostile graffiti has itself become an attraction, with holidaymakers eagerly posing beside it.
ABDT suggests a number of radical policies: ending public financing of tourism promotion, halting all new tourist accommodation licences and increasing the tourist tax to 12.5 per cent for overnight stays. Barcelona’s left-wing former mayor Ada Colau took steps to deal with overtourism. Most notably, she ramped up policing of illegal short-term rentals, galvanising an expanded number of “illegal apartment squads” that now patrol the streets searching for unlicensed flatshares. But for Rivacoba, it’s not enough.
One of ABDT’s demands is an end to cultural and sporting events aimed at expanding tourism. However, this month, Barcelona is hosting the 37th America’s Cup, attracting yet more visitors. Rivacoba isn’t swayed by the proposed income the yacht racing competition will generate. “Where is my €1,200?” he says, parroting an apparently popular question among Catalans these days, referencing their owed portion of the billion or so euros they’ve been told the event will generate. “There’s no such distribution. I mean, the bigger part of those incomes goes to a very restrained number of people, entrepreneurs and companies… For most of the population, the only thing left is shitty jobs [and] low wages.”
It’s difficult to envision a Barcelona without mass tourism, but Rivacoba believes it’s achievable. Locals caught a glimpse of it during the pandemic, before the industry came back bigger than ever (a phenomenon referred to as “revenge travel”). Suggestions to combat overtourism often revolve around making tourism less attainable, which at times suggests an implicit classism. Nonetheless, tourism is pushing up against some ineluctable barriers. There simply isn’t enough space in the city’s hot spots, and that’s not to mention the effects on climate change—in Barcelona, experts estimate that tourists emit 18 times more CO2 than residents do, factoring in air transport. Aside from ABDT’s manifesto, Rivacoba prescribes a change in mindset: overseas holidays can no longer be considered a right.
“This right to tourism does not exist,” he says. “It can’t exist, because not everyone in the world can enjoy it… There is a right to rest and vacation, a right that was won with the struggle of many people during the 20th century… We should think about having other kinds of holidays,” Rivacoba adds. “Tourism which consists of seeing a lot of places, taking a lot of photos and consuming a lot of things in very little time is not good for the planet, and probably not for the tourists either.”
