Overtourism: Barcelona’s Anti-Tourism Protests

Overtourism: Barcelona’s Anti-Tourism Protests

you’ve probably seen the news coverage of what happened just a couple days ago here in Barcelona with all of the protests against Mass tourism believe it or not in the last couple days I’ve been getting a lot of comments even some private messages and things about people wanting to know what was going on some worried about their trips and then some even talking about canceling them all together so thinking about all of that what I wanted to do was take some time to make a video and address some of the things that are going on here in Barcelona first I wanted to get into a little bit of the idea of what actually happened the other day with these protests what’s going on in Barcelona and Spain as a whole with some statistics about tourism and the amount of people that are coming in what those protests were talking about what they’re really looking for and what’s going on in Barcelona what the city’s doing about it as well and then at the end taking some time to look at how you can help if you’re coming over to Barcelona so that you’re not what those people were complaining about but before we dive deep into the video a little bit of a disclaimer and this is honestly not even a video I really wanted to make just after the protest I wanted to do a lot of reading and kind of get my thoughts together before making one now this is going to be a little bit different if you’ve watched other videos on the channel from some of the others where it’s they’re a little bit more scripted this is going to be a little bit more off the cup and some of the numbers that I’m going to throw out in terms of the statistics will be things that I just kind of remember or know from from beforehand but kind of keep that in mind now the real reason I really didn’t want to get into this video is because because I really kind of wanted to avoid a lot of the comments that I know are going to come obviously with an accent like this you know that I’m not originally from Barcelona but I have lived here for the better part of 14 years and working in tourism and with the channel I do have a better Insight onto what is going down so I wanted to share that with people especially after seeing a lot of those messages which is really the reason why I want to do this video with people being worried about coming over here in terms of safety being maybe attacked by people here in Barcelona or really just wanting to cancel the trips all together want to get into all of those things and talk about it now if you’re going to write all those comments and if you already wrote one already before in terms of Foreigner get out of here needy go home things like that well you guys that’s only going to help the engagement with the video so if you really want to make some sort of bad comment the best thing you can do to not help the video is not comment at all but my hope with this video is really to open up an open and honest dialogue about what’s going on mass tourism how is affecting not only Barcelona but all cities around the world so I wanted to start off with a little bit of a discussion on what actually happened on Saturday July 6th there was a protest where anywhere between about 3,000 people to 10,000 people always those numbers are differing depending on where you’re looking had a protest here against the mass tourism that Barcelona is experienced we’re down right where it started andanas carried over to the page colum and then got over to Jaan bbau in the barceloneta but you can even see some of the things that are left over over left from where they started the protest it says tourism is killing the neighborhoods and then over on the other side actually a sign that you’ll see quite a bit is this idea of tourists go home now what really got a lot of the media coverage and everything that people have been talking about with all the tourists that are coming into Barcelona is the fact that many of the people in these protests were squiring water guns at tourists who were sitting outside on restaurant Terraces or over by their hotels they’re also wrapping caution tape all around you saw the signs already but there were many more tourists aren’t welcome here tourists go home and that got a lot of coverage but it’s not something that’s Just Happening Here in Barcelona cities all around the world and especially all around Spain are having this issue of mass tourism we’ll get into the stats a little bit later but places like Malaga places like the baleric islands specifically mayorca you’ve also got the Canary Islands and even close to Barcelona Jona had similar protests so you’re seeing this not only in Spain but other parts of the world as well and I do have to add in that if you are planning a trip in the upcoming days weeks or month to Barcelona you will see that it was quite a reduced area where this specific protest has gone on but I can’t be for sure I would guess that this being one of the first real tourist protest against this Mass tourism that we’re seeing over here it might not be the last but I don’t think it’s something that you need to worry about before coming over now when we’re talking about Mass tourism over tourism what exactly does that mean for Barcelona let’s got into the the point where many of the locals especially those that are involved in the process were seeing that the city was becoming unlivable or very difficult because the overwhelming amount of people that are coming and visiting Barcelona and you guys know how much I love the city and how much I really just want to share all of that with you that are coming in it’s a place that understandably many people are going to want to come and visit but when you have a city that’s at 1.7 million in terms of a population and last year 2023 having 15 million tourists come coming and visiting you can see that there’s a lot of extra people in the city especially with the idea of how basically seasonal the the traveling is here in Spain as a whole you get a lot more of those people here in those summer months we’re filming right now in July and you do notice all of the people around July and August being those two most popular months to come over here and visit the city now in terms of Spain as a whole last year you got about 85 million tourists which was a record of all time taking out those years for the p pandemic in Barcelona from the year basically 2010 up until 2019 you had a record year each year with 2023 being think even the record at the moment but what they’re projecting already for 2024 is that it will probably be the record all time with 2 million people alone just coming in all of may now when we’re talking about tourists I did say it was 15 million but when we include visitors so some day Trippers and other people coming into the city you can get up to around maybe 26 or 27 million coming into the city and with a city this size matching numbers that you might see in larger cities like London Paris Rome places like that you realize it’s a lot of people but cries of over tourism Mass tourism really just too many people in the city Aren’t Enough what were those protesters really talking about what are the effects of over tourism on a city like far salon the first thing and probably one of the biggest discussions going on right now in Barcelona is the housing crisis Spain as a whole couple months back removed its golden Visa if you know what the golden Visa is basically if you had about half a million to spend on property coming from the outside you could get residency in Spain now with a lot of people talking about the prices and the prices really getting higher and higher and not being able to afford housing themselves rent or buying one of those things that they did as a result was taking away that golden Visa but specifically when we’re talking about Barcelona or we’re looking at the gothic quarter The Old City you’re seeing price for rent for just one room as high as 550 a month that’s around the average that they have right now which compared to 10 years ago is so much higher we’re seeing around a 70% increase in the price of housing right now and the price of salaries really not going up when we’re talking about renting a whole apartment that average price we’re looking at maybe about €1,200 so you see a lot of people here with the salaries that you make in Spain as a whole not being able to afford those places especially young people so you’re seeing people move out later or even getting their first Apartments their first houses much much later in life than many of the other European countries now salary-wise what we’ve had is increases each of the last couple years here in Spain but what you see as a minimum salary is around 1,00 a month now that is a little misleading because there are 14 payments a lot of times so that would be with 12 payments just under 1,300 a month or so but you see even with that if you’re getting that type of salary you’re not able to afford a lot of the housing here for the last couple years Airbnb and other similar platforms have been the main target for a lot of this anti-tourism sentiment what you’re seeing is a lot of people going with the short-term rental and with all the short-term rentals being asked for even more over here you’re seeing a lot less Apartments being rented out to the locals and really banking on the tourists coming in but if you were going to rent your apartment out for a th a month why do that with when you can get maybe a thousand a week now Barcelona’s already put in a lot of different measures and different things to take away a lot of those tourist Apartments you see things from as early as 2018 a lot of even a team of detectives making sure that these were legally registered apartments on a lot of these platforms and what they just have you’ve probably seen the news the biggest news before the protest was that they were going to the mayor just announced that they were going to take away all Airbnb licenses and all of those rent penil by the year 2028 so we’ll see what happens from 4 years from now but the idea is to take about 10,000 Apartments off the market giving those back to the people now that headline made a lot of news and a lot of people were sharing that as well but if you look at the actual numbers 10,000 apartments in Barcelona if I’m not mistaken is about 7% of all of the apartments so it’s really not going to make a big dent in terms of that so how are we going to address this issue of housing how are we going to address the issue of social housing where you have more affordable places for people to live from Barcelona so we don’t have everybody leaving another big topic to have these cities built for the people that are actually living here a lot of cities now what we’re seeing is that they’re tailoring all of their offers to those tourists and if you haven’t noticed what we’re doing right now as we walk through is we’re walking that same walk that those protesters made the other day but if you take a look along the pasage col all of the shops that are on the other side those are not shops that locals are going to go to you’ve got scooter rental youve got a supermarket which you might stop in if you need a water or something but you’ve got the water sports these are things that are much more geared to tourists so people living in these areas aren’t going to be able to go just down the street or down from their apartments and buy something that they’re looking for apart from that what you’re getting is prices higher and higher when we’re looking at the amount of people coming in a lot of those prices might be tailored to those tourists and not to like we talked about those salaries before the people that live here so people are getting priced out not only of the houses but the neighborhoods in general another big issue was tourism’s impact on the environment and the environmental crisis now we know that traveling is something that does weigh heavily on the environment and there are many people that are trying to look for alternative ways to traveling maybe not taking private cars but using public transportation a whole lot more and where you’re in Spain when you’re in Barcelona you have some great options in terms of those trains getting you all around using the metro and getting away from using those cars now this issue maybe wasn’t talked about as much in the protest here in Barcelona as it would have been in the Canary Islands in mayorca those islands that really experience a big boom in tourism in those summer months and people getting over there having to use those different modes of transportation but it is something that definitely does affect the city as well many of you will know that we just had a drought we were just we’re just coming out of emergency States for this drought that it really hadn’t been raining for almost a 3-year period here in Barcelona and so when the locals we were put on reserves and we were put on really limits on how much water we could actually use you saw a lot of these stipulations being put in all around the city and really trying to be enforced in hotels but how can you really do that I saw a lot of signs that we’re saying remember we’re in a drought please think about it before you know showering for a long time using the bathroom and everything like that but it really wasn’t affecting the tourist as much as it was the people that were living here and along with those long-term effects of Tourism you’re also looking at some of the shorter term events that are coming up in just under two months we’ll be hosting the America’s Cup and that’s going to bring in a lot of different people the city is really excited and you’ll see a lot of changes going on around the port and to the areas closer to the port as well it’s really revamped a lot of the construction of lambla the vatana all of these different things but you will see a large amount of people with the no alopa America no to the Americas cup not wanting to bring in all of the tourist that it’s going to bring but also higher grossing client so you’re going to see a lot of things maybe priced and activities priced for these people that some of the locals don’t have access to so you do see all sorts of different events and things some of them a little bit more expensive but more than anything this is supposed to be an event that the citizens of Barcelona can really enjoy as well so what is the city of Barcelona doing to help curve the effects of over tourism in the amount of people that are coming into the city well we’ve already talked about the Airbnb measures and for years they’ve been putting different restrictions on the platform and other platforms similar to that the problem is that a lot of times families not wanting to book multiple hotel rooms it is a lot more affordable to get an apartment so we’ll see how they can put some new measures in to really make sure that everybody can have access to some affordable housing when they’re staying over here and using those hotels as well but the big thing is going to be we’ll see if it actually happens but in 2028 if all of the licenses for those airbnbs verbos and all of the other platforms do actually come down and give back those apartments to the citizens another thing that they’ve done and it hasn’t been publicized as much but they’ve put restrictions on the number of people in those tour groups so if you’re visiting the old city this doesn’t affect any of the other neighborhoods or the districts but if you’re visiting that old city the gothic order Ral barceloneta and the Bourn what you have is a limit of 20 people per guide and what you’ll have are actually findes for those guides if they’re having more than those 20 people in the group the first time offense was $1,500 and the second time offense was actually €3,000 I don’t know how many people have actually been fined or how the groups the larger groups have been handling all of that but that is something they tried to do to curtail the number of people that were going into these smaller areas that are also some of the most popular areas in Barcelona another measure that’s been in place for the last couple years is actually limiting the number of cruise ships that can come in to Barcelona from those numbers that I gave you before about the total number of people coming into the city about 12 million of those were considered to be those tourists spending the night another 3 million or so are actually the people coming over on cruise ships just over half of those were ones that were coming through on a trip and stopping maybe for the day but many of those cruise ships apart from not coming at all the ones that do many of them have to either start or stop in Barcelona and what that does is that limits the amount of people that are just coming in for the day maybe not spending a lot of money but using Barcelona’s facilities so what you get are people maybe coming in a couple days before or adding on a couple nights to their stay after they get here and dock in Barcelona it’s one of those things that you’ll see that’s been happening in other cities as well but something that Barcelona’s definitely been looking at those are just some of the measures that Barcelona has put in in recent years to address the issue of over tourism and overcrowding if you know any others I’d love to hear about them in a comment below when you started hearing about the protest specifically in Barcelona I starting to give examples of other things that other cities has done as a result Venice for example has a new tax for people visiting that older part of the city where they are charging people for going into the old Alleyways those old canals and everything I think it’s just on the weekends and times when tourism is at its highest it’s not all the time Mount Fuji has also started charging people to go over and check out a limited area where not as many people can go in and you have other examples from cities like am that have increased the tourist tax the amount that you pay when you’re coming in staying at a hotel or anything most people don’t even know that they’re paying that but it is included in a lot of those stays that you have overnight now what’s the problem with all of these a lot of this is all defensive measures that they’re putting in none of this is taken beforehand it’s all things that are coming afterwards so we’re going to have to see maybe some newer measures some other things taking place to really make sure that people that are living here are okay with the amount of people coming in and we’ll talk a little bit later about things that you can do to make sure that you’re not one of those problems but what I should have mentioned before when we were talking about all of the statistics is that tourism alone counts for about 14% of the GDP over here Spain as a whole You’ve Got between about 12 and 15% as well so all of these measures coming in might help the locals and the kind of day-to-day life but a lot of times it’s affecting the economy and so when Spain is such a dependent country on the tourism that they have they’re looking for other measures and other things that they can do to continue to bring in different money so Barcelona is looking to be a city that is much more of tech startup and bringing in these newer Technologies the problem is if you’re bringing in different people like digital Nomads or people from outside again that that housing price really starts to go up and that’s where you see a lot of people complaining about it so it might not always be the tourism that’s the issue but other measures that are affected as well now like I said before at the beginning of the video one of the reasons I really wanted to address this issue is because I don’t want people that are already planning to come over to Barcelona to feel unsafe or not want to come all together I don’t think you need to cancel that trip because of the protest but you do need to be aware that when you’re visiting someone else’s country someone else’s home someone else’s City you do have an effect on the people around you but a lot of times when we’re looking at what we can do to make sure that we’re not part of the problem you hear a lot of these arguments of having not all the tourists but the right tourist and quality tourism and a lot of times what that boils down to when they’re saying quality tourist is they’re talking about having money and I don’t think that needs to be the case it’s not about the amount of money you have but it’s about what you’re doing while you’re here so what I want to talk about now is a little bit of an idea of things that you can do to make sure that you’re not adding to the problem while you’re here in Barcelona now one of the first things that I think you can do if you want to help with the issue of over tourism is traveling out of pink season traveling at a different time of the year as we talked about before July August those are the two months with the most amount of people now obviously why that’s going to happen is because of the vacation schedules not only for work but definitely for schools as well but when you come over to Barcelona seen my don’ts video I say don’t come in August it is really hot I if youve noticed it I’ve been walking around today already working up a sweat and we’re just in July it is really hot but there are a lot of people around and so when you start to see everybody coming in at the same time it really isn’t as great of an experience if you can come in some of those other times during the year even coming in play Times Like February March where those temperatures are much lower you will see a difference in the amount of people in the city you don’t have to book as far in advance you don’t have to wait in those lines and you definitely have easier access into different restaurants and everything another thing that you can do is you can spread out not always staying in the very very center of these cities especially here like The Goth quarter the born those are the most popular places where you’re going to see people all the time if you get to maybe other areas of the city you’re also going to be visiting other places finding other restaurants and really that’s one of the big things that you need to be doing when you come make sure that you’re spending you’re buying you’re eating at local places you want to support the local economy you want to eat at those nicer places that are not those big chains and one of the biggest things that I think that we need to do before traveling to these cities especially to places like Barcelona is do your research when we’re traveling the idea is to experience a different culture to see some new things it’s not a checklist of okay I’ve been to Barcelona because I’ve seen the SAG Familia the kasabach and the Kasa some of the most important places around here some of the most beautiful places that you can see but it’s not mandatory to see all of them I always recommend that if you’re coming over you should see the sagata Familia it’s probably the number one place that I always recommend but you can get over and see some other things if you don’t want to see that cigara Familia if you don’t want to see some of these other places you’re not obliged to do that a lot of times I get a question specifically about going over to I should say before when the camp no is open should I go and visit the camp no should I see this idea for the football club Barcelona and if you’re interested in football you definitely should but you’ll be surprised with how many people ask that to me and they’re not interested in seeing football you have no reason you have to see all of these places do that research find out a little bit more about the city and find out about other options that you can go and visit while you’re here and last but not least one of the things that I think we need to keep in mind is that we need to respect the local we’re all tourists we’re all traveling to different places but when you’re not at home remember you are visiting other people’s homes as well I’m sure many of the people that were involved in that protest the other day have traveled to other places so saying that they don’t want tourism at all really shouldn’t be the issue because I’m sure many of them have traveled themselves but when we’re not at home when we’re in somebody else’s we should be treating others the way we want to be treated as well and one of the I always see especially around Barcelona are people walking with their shirts off did you see them walking without their shirts on something you probably wouldn’t do at home walking around drinking beers drinking alcohol in the streets that is not something that’s legal and you probably wouldn’t do that at your house either one of the things I always think about is if you’re walking around the gothic quar those smaller streets of the barceloneta where we are right now kind of keep your voices down remember that other people are living around there and those voices always seem to carry there’s a whole list of different things but it’s kind of always that idea of treat others the way that you want to be treated and despite the fact that we have all of these people visiting we can all get along in harmony so if you made it to the end of the video I want to thank you for joining me from the bottom of lamla dasas over the page colom 2 where we are right now the barceloneta if you have any ideas about the over tourism in Barcelona and you want to share that with some others my idea and hope for this video is that it really is the start of a conversation that we can have in a very friendly manner to kind of understand what is going on and help us to all share these spaces together Barcelona is an amazing City one that I am proud to be able to call home that I absolutely love and I want to make sure that when you come over you can enjoy it as well so if you do have plans to come and visit the city within the next couple of months I hope you’re not thinking about cancelling or worried about your safety while you’re here just remember to keep in mind that you are visiting somebody else’s home enjoy Barcelona and maybe see around

I’ve recieved a lot of messages about the anti-tourism protests in Barcelona and how it will affect upcoming visits. I’m hoping this can create a dialogue about traveling, not only in Barcelona, but around the world.

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