There are plenty of reasons to worry about overtourism in some of the world’s most frequently visited cities, from skyrocketing CO2 emissions to increased gentrification and rising housing costs pushing out longtime residents. Last month, protesters took to the streets of various Spanish cities to demonstrate against their economic reliance on tourism, from Barcelona to Mallorca, sporting signs like “Tourists go home” and even spraying tourists with water guns.
More than ever, it is Americans who are responsible for much of Europe’s tourism, per a Wall Street Journal article. In May, almost 2.5 million Americans departed for Europe, according to data provided to The Journal, an increase of almost 500,000 from 2019 numbers. This is certainly bad news for the climate — by 2030, transport-related CO2 emissions from international tourism are expected to grow by 25% from 2016 levels, per a report from UN Tourism and the International Transport Forum.
But even domestic tourism has proved to be a problem within the United States. In North America, travel and tourism made up roughly 9.1% of the gross domestic product and contributed 11.3% to the continent’s total employment in 2019. In places like Hawaii, where tourism quickly reached pre-pandemic tourism levels a little more than a year after COVID-19 first started to spread, mass tourism exploits the area’s culture in the name of financial gain, as one young Hawaiian told Teen Vogue. But responsible travel advocates say there are ways to travel ethically and with positive cultural effects. Part of that is better understanding the problem. (Sites like Inside Airbnb have popped up to show the impact short-term rentals can have on the long-term housing market.)
Teen Vogue called up Daniel Pardo Rivacoba, a member of the citizen group that organized the July 6 protest in Barcelona, to better understand the group’s goals and what he sees as a sustainable future for tourism.
Daniel Pardo Rivacoba: Since the beginning of the 2000s, the social conflict around tourism had been growing little by little, and there were some rough neighborhood collectives working on different precise issues. By 2010, some of us stated that we needed some kind of coordination to work on the struggle at the city scale and no longer keep with the tiny neighborhood battles.
In August 2014, the neighborhood of La Barceloneta, which is the so-called fishermen neighborhood in the center but with a very particular collective identity, for one month every evening had a demonstration in the streets. People like me who had been trying to mobilize around these neighborhoods and it wasn’t happening — suddenly, it just happened all at once.
In 2015, there was an election for the City Hall, and there were two parties that were taking the impacts of touristification seriously, with quite critical speeches. We as ABDT didn’t exist yet, but I think this also helped with the idea that there was a possibility of real change around tourism. That also reinforced our movement, which didn’t exist yet but was about to be born.
DPR: This is the most extended worry, and it’s shared by so many people because more and more people are differently affected by this. It’s becoming really generalized.
Another one of the impacts most shared by the people of Barcelona is the massification [or standardization] of public space and the public transport network — we always try to comment on this, because very often, journalists and others use mass tourism as the problem, and it’s not. It’s just one of many impacts it has.
Even more important is the fact that the economy of the city becomes absolutely specialized towards tourists. It generates a very high dependence on that sector, and it makes the city much more vulnerable to so many kinds of crises that can happen at any time, because tourism is volatile. We’ve seen it very clearly with COVID-19, but we also saw it three years before with the terrorist attack on Las Ramblas — [when a van collided with tourists and residents, killing 16]. It can be a pandemic, it can be a terrorist attack, it can be the geopolitical situation, but there are so many factors that make tourism dynamics change very quickly and without any possibility of anticipating it.
DPR: It creates so many jobs, but honestly, they are among the worst in the city, both in wages and in work conditions, and it doesn’t redistribute the huge amounts of money it makes. It just polarizes society more and more between the winners and the losers.
DPR: They are addressed to the different levels of public administration, but honestly, up until now, we were just ignored, which is quite strange for the biggest demonstration around tourism. We’re talking about at least 15,000 people in the streets that day. [Editor’s note: Outlets like NBC News have reported protest turnout from police at around 2,800 people, but ABDT has consistently said between 15,000 and 20,000, according to media reports.] But it's not very surprising coming from the city government we have right now, which is especially pro-tourism. But we know they care, because they are being more careful in their statements around tourism, but they don’t really feel like giving us the importance to meet us.
DPR: It could be a good policy, but waiting four years — I don’t know where they want the people who will be kicked out in those four years to go. On the other hand, at the moment, this is only a proposal, so we hope it can happen, but it’s not enough by itself. There is still another modality of rental in Barcelona called seasonal rental, from 31 days to one year. There have been different regulations of rental in Spain, but none of them have included these temporary rentals. …We already did that, there’s no need to repeat it.
DPR: We always talk about these local impacts, but there are also global impacts related to the environment and to the climate crisis, and to me, they are among the most important ones. Tourism activity is responsible for about 8% of the CO2 emissions in the world. So the conclusion is very easy: we have to urgently and radically decrease the number of flights, otherwise we are just killing the planet and killing ourselves.
We as a collective don’t really believe in consumption as a tool for transformation, so we want to work instead on tourism production. This means regulating markets, like mandating that this airport must decrease its activity by half. This kind of frantic tourist consumption — a weekend in New York, a week in Sweden, August in Mallorca — it’s not possible. There is not such a right to tourism, but we do have a right and a need for rest and vacation and relaxation. So what if we just travel 50 kilometers or 100 kilometers? That’s more or less how I see the future.
DPR: I think we have a lot to learn from it. First of all, these actions were not thought up by the organization — they were just spontaneous actions by people coming to the march. Personally, I found them funny and I could never have imagined the importance that it got that, to me, it doesn’t have.
There’s something really absurd about the fact that the same media that is criticizing the use of water guns would have never called you if there hadn’t been any water guns. So, in the end, we just feel like we have to think about something in that vein for the next one, because it’s working. It’s true that it takes a little too much work to try to refocus on the real problems, but we get to do it, and the whole world is talking about the problems of touristification in Barcelona.
DPR: There are different ways of being a tourist in a place, but it’s also true that in a context of high touristification, it’s not up to you. You’re just one more piece in a big machine, and you can do a little better or a little worse, but you will probably have to take a plane and get an accommodation and you will be one more in the crowd.
As I said before, we don’t focus on the consumption, we’re focused on the production, but if I had to tell them something, I would tell them: it’s just better if you don’t come. It hurts the city and it hurts its population.
DPR: The general idea is to change not the tourism model but the economic model of the city. Obviously, other economic sectors must be promoted in order to keep on as a city and as an economic system. In the tourism degrowth process, one of the first priorities must be training programs for the people that were working in tourism. We can’t propose such a large economic change without thinking about the social groups that always suffer the most from every crisis. So they must be a priority in that transition.
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