Record visitor numbers are provoking protests, but their spending props up the economy. Policymakers are trying to find a balance.
Already a subscriber?They were the squirts heard around the world. A handful of anti-tourism protesters doused visitors to Barcelona with water pistols during a demonstration this month, chasing them off restaurant terraces.
But in some countries the mass of pleasure seekers has grown so great that, from Venice and Amsterdam to Lisbon and the Greek island of Santorini, the patience of locals has snapped. On the mainland’s southern coast, more than 5,000 turned out in Málaga along with several thousand in Alicante and Cádiz. There have been demonstrations in Seville, in San Sebastián, and even in the Lavapiés district of Madrid, one of the most voguish European capitals. The word of the summer here is “tourism-phobia”.Despite the soaking given to tourists in Barcelona, the goal of protests is not to vilify or blame individual visitors, says Cusó.
Jordi Hereu, Spain’s tourism minister, is mindful of finding the right balance. The country’s visitor record last year was “an unquestionable success”, he says. Its tourist promotion agency predicts that visitor numbers from June to September will be up 13 per cent from a year ago. But Spain must remember that its tourist magnets are also home to its people, Hereu adds. “We must listen to the demands, wherever they come from, because without citizens there are no tourist destinations.
First, the search for experiences and authenticity went viral: more tourists started leaving beaches and city centres to flock to neighbourhood festivals, isolated villages and natural parks that were not used to seeing them but found themselves promoted by travel influencers.Then Covid-19 struck. Residents had a sudden taste of having their homes to themselves again, but with a costly flipside: governments racked up huge debts to compensate for the disappearance of tourism income.
Arturo Mas-Sardá, chair of the PortAventura amusement park and hotel complex on the Catalan coast, says it is necessary to “de-dramatise” the issue and do a better job of communicating how “tourism has enormous positive effects in terms of GDP and the number of jobs it generates”. In many tourist centres, fines for urinating in the streets, and even in the sea, are multiplying. Although rising summer temperatures do not deter everyone, they are helping efforts to spread visitors out across the year.But many local residents demand new measures to address the most painful economic pinch point: housing.
But he will not replicate the blunt “stay away” campaign that Amsterdam directed at boozy Britons last year, saying it did not work. Instead the plan is to switch to high-end marketing focused on Barcelona’s fine restaurants, music festivals and the artistic heritage of Picasso, Gaudí and Miró. The third solution to overtourism, pushed by many in the travel industry, rests on the idea that the root of the problem is not too many people but too little capacity.Places only feel overwhelmed if they have not been prepared to cope, they say. What is needed are co-ordinated investments in housing, urban transport and water systems. It is not a diagnosis promoted by governments, because it pins the blame on them.
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