Barcelona anti-tourism protesters spray guests with water weapons

• 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 printed Saturday, together with restrictions on vacationer lodging, fewer cruise terminals within the metropolis’s port and an finish to tourism ads 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 resolution made by particular person protesters and was not steered by organizers. “Receiving water in your face will not be good, but it surely’s not violent,” he stated.
• Responding to rising issues, Barcelona Mayor Jaume Collboni pledged Saturday to order 10,000 residential models often utilized by vacationers for native residents and improve taxes on vacationers, amongst different measures.

Barcelona has lengthy been a well-liked vacationer vacation spot. Final 12 months, near 26 million visited the area, in response to official figures, and Spain was the second-most visited nation on the earth, in response to 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 a minimum of 2-3 years earlier than the pandemic,” he stated in an e-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 will not be alone in its discontent with guests. Locales in Japan, Indonesia, Greece, Italy and the Netherlands have additionally taken steps to curb influxes previously 12 months.

In Japan, one city sought to put in an enormous display screen at a well-liked picture spot in entrance of Mount Fuji to cease vacationers from taking selfies and inflicting site visitors jams. Final 12 months, the Greek authorities imposed a brand new timed ticketing system for the traditional Acropolis, a UNESCO World Heritage web site, 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 recent inns.

“I feel 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 potential resolution, Zhang steered figuring out the capability of fashionable websites and controlling site visitors, reminiscent of by “utilizing expertise the place real-time knowledge could be communicated to vacationers such that overcrowded locations could possibly be prevented,” he stated.

However Bob McKercher, a professor on tourism on the College of Queensland in Australia, raised one other subject: The vast majority of vacationers worldwide are home. “So whereas overtourism could also be a long-standing subject,” he stated, “can you actually cease individuals from visiting their very own nation?”

Beatriz Ríos contributed to this report.