Protesters in Barcelona have sprayed visitors with water as part of a demonstration against mass tourism.
Demonstrators marching through areas popular with tourists on Saturday chanted “tourists go home” and squirted them with water pistols, while others carried signs with slogans including “Barcelona is not for sale.”
Thousands of protesters took to the streets of the city in the latest demonstration against mass tourism in Spain, which has seen similar actions in the Canary Islands and Mallorca recently, decrying the impact on living costs and quality of life for local people.
The demonstration was organised by a group of more than 100 local organizations, led by the Assemblea de Barris pel Decreixement Turístic (Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth).
Barcelona DOES have a unique reputation for these anti-tourist groups. That’s why I said Barcelona was unique. But it’s NOT unique in hosting large numbers of tourists. Not even close.
The literal exact same thing happens in every other alike place. We have the same in Lisbon.
The pieces of information foreigners get do not necessarily match the local truths.
As an example: I do volunteering at a kind-of-food-bank. It is obviously free to do. However, if you try to look that up in the internet, every single result will lead you to the idea that you need to have a guide or whatever reason to pay in order to do volunteering in here. The English information is HIGHLY distorted to hit foreigners. It is 100% unreliable. Do not attempt to look up for things about southern European countries in English. Most things that can somehow be capitalized on are lies or deceptive.
Okay. Well I’ve been to plenty of capital and major cities in London and Barcelona is the only place I’ve ever seen anti tourist stuff around and heard about this in the media. Granted, I’ve not been to Lisbon.
Random tweet I just came across: https://x.com/Scaife51/status/1811403266531471842?t=4fdIaowFfaHmYv77no51LQ
That’s this place: https://www.reddit.com/r/portugal/comments/1e1c4ky/why_albufeira_is_a_british_colony/
Can you realistically believe that one can live in there without being anti-tourist? That’s NOT a one off. That’s a very common occurrence in the south coast (both Portugal and Spain). It is not a major city or anything like that. Every city down there is currently like that.
I think it’s fair to say that football hooliganism is not unique to any particular place, and is a specific and unique problem. I do find football hooligans a nightmare. Is that the same problem as we’re discussing with general tourism? I would argue no. Football hooligans are horrible in their own countries too.
That’s an absolutely perfect example of what I’m saying. Whose fault is that - the individual who goes to that place, or the local government for approving those businesses to set themselves up on that street? If I lived there I would be furious. Not with the tourist spending money there, but with government for enabling the situation.
I’ve travelled around Spain and Italy (not Portugal, though I would love to visit one day) and I completely agree that it’s a shame when places are taken over by businesses that cater to tourists to the detriment of the authentic local culture. The first place that comes to mind for me is Amalfi in Italy, where this was by far the worst part about my visit there, despite it being an absolutely gorgeous part of the world.
Where we disagree is where the responsibility lies. I do not believe it’s the fault of the individual tourist. Local and national governments absolutely have the ability to change the situation. Obviously they don’t because tourism brings in so much money. I don’t particularly see how accosting and blaming individuals who have come to visit achieves anything or places blame on the people whose literal job it is to regulate these things.
Yes, over-tourism and hooligans are disjoint problems. But if it is so cheap going to a place that you can just grab your fella drunkards and go you end up mixing them both in…weird ways.
Britain is not that rich anymore (and we aren’t in 2011 anymore), however, during peak crisis (when the IMF rescued Portugal and almost had to do the same with Spain) we couldn’t do much besides accepting anything that was bringing money, no matter how little. For some reason, the brits got used to to go to Algarve as “their” vaction spot, so much that this predates the tourist boom, and at this point in time they just straight up bought everything. You can’t say no when your country is near bankrupt.
The 2008 financial crisis was a major turning point for this massified tourism. The “lazy southern people that don’t want to work” had to accept any money that tourists could bring and accept any consequences. Partly due to this, there’s this culture that tourists are immune to everything. If you think that hooligans are bad in a place with functioning cops, imagine them in a place that, at most, says “please don’t do that” and lets you go, every single time. Even the Germans, which generally are strict rule followers, stop having any regard for simple laws.
That very same “lazy southern people that don’t want to work” stereotype also got many people considering the northern Europeans to be entitled assholes. Not individually. There’s not all that much xenophobia when dealing with individuals 1:1, but when considering them as a group of people, there’s a lot of resentment. Germany, the UK and France being in crisis and facing the same problems we faced is giving some sweet sensation to a lot of people.
There’s also the cultural idea that “when you’re not in your town, you behave”, even internally. People from Oporto have the same prejudice towards Lisbon people. “They come here and act like this is their place, chanting and whatever, twats” goes Portuguese to Portuguese, no need to add foreigners for that attitude to be a thing.
There’s enough context to everything to write quite a few books. Nothing in these interactions are as simple as “people are annoyed at competition in their markets so they’re pointing water guns”.
There was the time period I just described where the governments could not have a say towards that + tragedy of commons. Every local government wants to have “the best behaved and richest tourists” so a race to the bottom it goes. Now it is a complete mess to fix the situation, especially since the Portuguese no longer own those places.
As a local government you can’t go against the majority of your people, and the majority of people in Algarve are Brits and French. They own entire regions. Years and years of this environment cause that. Even in the Lisbon region, plenty of tourists buy properties because “wow, such nice weather, everything cheap”, which they end up treating as investment because why wouldn’t them?
There was this particularly damning “golden visa” scheme during the IMF days where you’d get Portuguese citizenship and a myriad of rights if you invested 250k (?) in real estate. A whole lot of people started doing investment tourism due to that and they’re totally capitalizing on that.
The way I see it, there are two major classes of tourist in here. The rich fellas which bought the entire property market, with the richest of them tanking our water supplies with their golf courts and lobbying against any changes. And the bingo-card tourist which sees “50€ on Ryanair, nice! Honey, let’s go to Portugal, it is a place in Spain that has some pubs just like home”. You have a few other classes like the guys that actually enjoy discovering cultures and whatnot, but my personal experience tells me that there aren’t all that many like that even though all of them will say that they’re doing just that.
Now, none of this wall of text pointed at “firing water at people” as a solution; it just pointed a good deal of the context why other solutions are near impossible. However, in a way dissimilar to Portugal, Catalonia actually is a powerhouse. They can actually just limit the amount of people going there and succeed that way. But 1) business travellers are barely distinguishable from tourists 2) Madrid is a pain.
The whole point is that this is a very hard to solve mess. Most people don’t know these details; they merely know that we have a “too many tourists; go away” attitude; they could be halfway decent and just respect it, unless they have some particular interest in the country. There’s a trivial way to distinguish. We actually love to see people trying to speak Portuguese; even if they utterly fail; because this is enough to distinguish them from the 99%. This is how desperate we are for people that actually value anything in Portugal but the pictures and weather.
I’ll just start by saying I found your comment very interesting and insightful and I’ve learned a lot about the local challenges so thank you for taking the time to educate me. I still stand by my core argument but I appreciate your account and it was an interesting read.
What I would add is that I think it’s very easy to fall into the trap of judging all tourists by the loud ones. The vast majority are just trying to get some time away and enjoy some time abroad and do so respectfully. I’d respectfully disagree that they’re the minority. Yeah, certain places get more tourists because the flights are cheap. Well, times are tough and I think less well-off people also deserve a holiday. It’s not really their fault if some places are more affordable than others.
Vacant holiday homes is a massive problem here as well, especially in regions like Cornwall and the Lake District. And also London, where the ultra wealthy of the world essentially use the city as a bank account to store their wealth. Personally I’m in favour of taxing the hell out them to disincentivise the practice and bring down house prices for genuine residents and families. But much like the tourism situation we’ve been discussing, it’s such a huge source of income for the country that I don’t envision this really happening. As much as I’d like it to.
It’s the job of politicians to resolve the systemic issues (though I don’t pretend to know how). If they don’t have a strong enough mandate to do so then, well, that’s democracy isn’t it? I say this as someone who about a week ago won the first vote of their adult voting life after a decade and a half living under a conservative government who I can’t stand. By all means campaign and protest to support your cause for the next vote, but I continue to condemn the type of protest shown in the original post. I don’t think it’s right to form a mob around perceived-foreigners, chant at them and spray water at them - which is my core point I wanted to originally make.