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).
Define “mass tourism”. If we’re simply going by tourists per capita, or better tourist-days per capita, there’s plenty of places with very high numbers that are doing well – but those aren’t cities, much less vibrant ones. They’re things like mountain villages with ski resorts, with a couple of original farms offering a couple of rooms, a few smaller hotels dotted throughout, plenty of seasonal workers and when the season is over the whole villages resumes to what it has done for millennia: Subsistence agriculture. Maybe some forestry, and there’s also a sawmill. At a way higher living standards than would be possible by exporting cheese or whatnot.
…not speaking about extreme places like Davos, though, nothing is normal or typical about that place. They’re also more than rich enough to afford public housing and democratic enough to actually build it, YMMV in otherwise comparable places.
What basically never works out economics-wise is all-inclusive resorts: Those are generally built by outside investors, capitals thus flowing out of the local area, they may pay the local residents well in season but out of season they’re out of work and local non-tourist industry has to deal with not being able to afford workers in season. Some may be able to adapt but you can’t just shut down most factories, physically and/or because you need that operation time to pay back your loans. Thus the local industry gets killed off, or can’t develop in the first place. Not going to happen in that mountain village because it never had the chance to develop anything serious in the first place, geography and all.
Oh, other example: Wacken. Just over 2000 inhabitants, maybe 6k taking surrounding municipalities into account, each year visited by 80-100k pilgrims. About 10% of the inhabitants flee during the festival, the rest is hustling. It’s short enough to not disturb the local economy yet brings in tons of money.
Before i reply i really would need to know if you are even joking, i get that its a trend on lemmy, going rondabouts in a discussion completely losing the point of the argument in a long post instead of replying to what the other user said, but to have to read arguments about tourism outside major cities in things like ski resorts and small villages when the thread is about Barcelona (and the metropolitan area around it) and im bringing examples about what other major cities are doing just seems like trolling at this point by your part.
The metropolitan area of Barcelona has 5,3 million population, im sure an example of a random village with 2k people applies. By the way, a big part of tourism in BCN is already on the edges of the metropolitan area on illegal, or at least gray, airBnbs.
Go on again about tourism on villages in specific seasons and agriculture? Just lol.
Anyway, have a good day mate.
I mean it was you who started making claims about mass tourism in general, not specifically mass tourism in cities.
If all those tourists would pack up and flock to Extremadura I bet the locals would be very welcoming, not much more than agriculture and power generation there, economy-wise.
The only mass tourism outside cities is Disney world. Only cities are big enough for mass tourism
That’s why I asked you to define mass tourism, and gave my own definition. Which definitely fits more with how I see the word used elsewhere, e.g. one commonly given example is Hallstadt: Population 787, up to 30k tourists per day.