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Barcelona Spain

“Tourists go home”, Barcelona’s problem with tourism

"Tourists, go home, you are not welcome", anti-tourist graffiti Gracia, Barcelona
"Tourists, go home, you are not welcome", anti-tourist graffiti in Gracia, Barcelona

Marcus

Tourists go home

Seeing the first graffiti was a novelty. A rush of intrigue and levity. A brief distraction to the mundane. A gentle act of dissent. “Tourists go home”, the blue scrawl boldly proclaimed.

Very soon we saw more. More and more. Every block, corner and wall seemed to be inscribed with the message. A coordinated and planned act of defiance.

A sinking sense of unease built. “What the f*ck are we doing here”, I thought.

"Tourists, go home, you are not welcome", anti-tourist graffiti Gracia, Barcelona
“Tourists, go home, you are not welcome”, anti-tourist graffiti in Gracia, Barcelona

This was my first experience of Gracia, the traditionally working class area in Barcelona. At the forefront of the debate: has tourism gone too far?

Barcelona as a tourist destination

Barcelona hasn’t always been such an emblematic tourist destination. The 1992 Olympic triggered urban regeneration and put the city in the consciousness of travellers. Given Barcelona’s endowment of sun, history and a rich catalan culture as well as a concerted push from the local government, the city was ready to take off.

Prior to the pandemic, there were approximately 32 million annual visitors to the city, in 1992 the figure was 1.7 million. The permanent population within the city limits is 1.6 million, giving a ratio of about 19 visitors to permanent residents.

This contrasts with London that has a population of about 9 million and welcomed 22 million international visitors in 2019.

It’s not simply the bare numbers. Half of the 32 million are day-trippers, of which a large chunk are cruise passengers. As a result many of the tourists congregate in the most popular areas, such as Las Ramblas, Park Guell and La Sagrada, determined to see the iconic sights in their short-time. This leads to extreme congestion in certain spots and means that the vast sums spent by tourists are concentrated in a limited number of tourist cafes and gift-shops, with little left over for other parts of the city.

Quoted in the Guardian, Marti Cuso, a resident in the Gothic Quarter, the city’s busiest tourist area bemoaned, 

“My barrio is so saturated with tourists it’s impossible to meet someone in the street or for children to play or even to get a good night’s sleep,”

tourism kills the city, Gracia Barcelona
“Tourism kills the city”, street art in Gracia near Park Guell

A consultation carried out in 2015 by the local government pointed to various issues with overtourism, including anti-social behaviour, overcrowding and a loss of identity.

Tourism brings enormous revenue to the city and accounts for a significant part of the economy, but as with many economic issues society grapples with today, it’s not just the size of the pie – it’s how you share it. The consultation highlighted ‘poor redistribution of the wealth generated and poor quality jobs”.

Tourists go home, carteristas welcome - gracia barcelona
“Tourists go home, carteristas welcome” – graffiti in Gracia Barcelona. Carteristas translates as ‘pickpockets’

A salutory encounter in Valencia

The ethics of tourism and its effects on local communities have particularly interested me since first moving to Valencia. An ever growing ex-pat community, drawn mainly from Northern Europe, have decamped to the mediterranean city, taking advantage of looser working remote rules since the pandemic and the city’s attractive climate, cost of living and cultural offerings.

One sunny saturday afternoon I was in St. Patrick’s, Valencia’s best Irish pub, and had brought along a friend (and also my Spanish teacher), Pedro, who, like me, had recently moved to the city – but instead of coming from London, he had moved from Cadiz in Andalucia. Whereas I was finding the cost of living cheap, to Pedro, Valencia was more expensive. [Before you judge me too quickly, I found myself in a Irish pub as I had wanted to watch an Irish rugby match and Pedro wanted to experience a raucous Irish pub atmosphere.]

Very soon we started talking with another Irishman, Paul, 30, from the Northside of Dublin. Paul had decided to move to Valencia as even with a good job the cost of living in Dublin was not sustainable. Why, he thought, should I put up with a non-existent life where nearly all his earnings were swallowed up by rent, when I could move with my Irish salary and live comfortably in a sunny and culturally rich city. No one disagreed.

Later that evening Pedro revealed to me that he was thinking of moving back home to live with his parents in Andalucia. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t make his teacher wage stack up against the rising cost of living. A box room without daylight was all he could afford at that point.

One month later, Pedro was back in Cadiz and Paul was still enjoying life in Valencia. The linked nature of Europe’s housing markets had become visibily apparent, bonded by the freedom of remote working. Dublin’s rental crisis (as well as other cities’) could spill into Valencia.

Back to Barcelona

Back to Barcelona, and as we ventured further into Gracia, there was no let-up in the grafiti. However, something new caught my eye: tourists gleefully posing by the inscriptions thumbs up and ironic smiles, excited by the potential for an edgy insta shot. In a kafkaesque turn, instead of putting people off, the grafiti had itself become an attraction.

It partly demonstrates the gordian knot with which tourist dependent locations grapple: how to extricate yourself from an addictive dependency on the supposedly easy cash of foreign tourists? Like an oil rich country that grows fat on its natural resources, leaving other industries lying fallow, an alternative path becomes less and less attractive. For many governments, the natural equilibrium is then to double down on the tourist industry instead of trying to resurrect or develop other parts of the economy. The alternative path involves too much short-term pain, making it politically unviable.

When it comes down to it, the grafiti is not so much aimed at the tourists but really the local authorities that encourage tourism, whether its through loose regulation or financial incentives, and the businesses that exploit these conditions.

The tragedy is that with a greater focus on tourism, the place loses its identity and the reasons that people came in the first place start to fade away. It simply becomes like everywhere else. In Barcelona, a new word has been coined: parquetematización – the act of becoming a theme park. Barcelona is reduced to an imitation of itself.

What can you do?

The website “Responsible Travel” gives some tips on how to visit Barcelona more sustainably, such as going outside of the summer months, going midweek, staying for longer than a day and, when doing so, booking registered accommodation. [Alas our weekend stay in the middle of August broke their first two rules…]. The excellent resource for responsible travel provides advice not just for Barcelona but across the world.

An alternative option of course is to eschew Barcelona in favour of another Spanish city: Valencia is an excellent option (notwithstanding the story relayed above) with its unique culture, mediterranean seaside location, rich cuisine and history – but significantly cheaper and without the hordes of tourists. My blog contains numerous guides to Valencia, including tips on alternative things to see and to do, and how best to settle in if moving there..

By Marcus

I've started this blog to share my experiences while travelling during my sabbatical. Focus on travel, food, drink, and history.

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