Anti-tourism movements

[Electric Circus]

Here are a few recent headlines about anti-tourism protests in Spain. The latest demonstrations to receive international coverage are in the Canary Islands:

Reuters: Thousands protest in Spain's Canary Islands over mass tourism (2024-04-20)

Holding placards reading "People live here" and "We don't want to see our island die", demonstrators said changes must be made to the tourism industry that accounts for 35% of gross domestic product (GDP) in the Canary Islands archipelago.

Straits Times: Too much tourism sparks backlash in Spain (2024-04-17)

In the southern port of Malaga on the Costa del Sol, a centre of Spain’s decades-old “soy y playa” or “sun and beach” tourism model, stickers with unfriendly slogans such as “This used to be my home” and “Go home” have appeared on the walls and doors of tourist lodgings.

In Barcelona and the Balearic Islands, activists have put up fake signs at the entrances to some popular beaches warning in English of the risk of “falling rocks” or “dangerous jellyfish”.

EuroNews: The Europoean cities where locals are fighting back against overtourism (2024-03-15)

One of the most popular islands, Tenerife, recently declared a water emergency. That added more fuel to the fire for locals, as some tourist areas there use up to six times more water than residential areas, putting pressure on reserves crucial for drinking water and farming.

In February, nearby Gran Canaria saw walls emblazoned with the message, 'tourists and digital nomads go home', something newspaper the Canarian Weekly reported as 'tourismphobia'.

On the Balearic island Mallorca last August, residents put up fake signs along a number of beaches, reading: “beware of dangerous jellyfish” and “caution, falling rocks”.

Elsewhere, Amsterdam has banned new hotels. Other places are coping with "overtourism" by walling off popular photo spots, capping daily visitors to attractions, and imposing additional fees on travelers. Forbes reports that Dubrovnik has restricted travel with rolling luggage, while Nice has installed aggressive street art, including giant rat traps "to eradicate and eliminate the tourist pest."

While in each instance these reactions are driven by particular local concerns, this is an issue with broader implications in terms of political debates about ecology, globalization, information technology, and so on. Many parts of the world have become more difficult (or just less pleasant) for global travelers over the past few years, which raises the question of whether that trend will continue and, if so, what its implications will be.

[pikachu]

I sympathize with these ppl more after having lived in Midtown Manhattan - I knew what I was getting into, but even I was on my last nerve following Christmas season. I can imagine that if you’re living in a place which doesn’t have that type of tourist infrastructure and the (mis)fortune of being the flavor of the month on Insta or Tiktok that it can be

Interestingly, anti-tourism anger is important enough that AirBnB puts out a lot of PR on how it’s a leader in fighting against mass tourism and distributing the burden across cities. Not that it leads anywhere useful though.

[Meclazine for Israel]

Overtourism is fair enough.

The locals feel excluded from their best amenities like restaurants and hotels.

It actually just means the countries in question have not planned for success. Tourism is one of the best economic growth sectors for any country.

It's renewable and sustainable, it makes your country look more attractive.

[Red Velvet]

I didn’t get this phenomenom before living for a year in Spain, but after the experience I fully support anti-tourism movement.

It’s good to share what you think it’s great for others to discover, but not under the cost of your own experience or the place itself becoming uncharacteristic. It’s weird to be in a more touristy part of the city and not feel like you’re in the country or in some extreme cases, that place to be accessible only for the rich and for the tourists themselves.

Europe has a specific problem with this because countries are small and very easy to get to - lots of factor stimulating high tourism - while already being expensive but becoming even more because of tourism. In natural or historical areas - and Europe is very historical - there’s the added risk of deterioration of these landmarks by bad tourists behavior and it’s impossible to control who will be a good ir bad tourist. If you get massive tourism you will inevitably receive tons of good people but also lots of bad ones.

Even walking around in the center of Lisbon, around Chiado, I often felt I was in Brazil by the number of Brazilians around me. Also lots of European foreigners in there as well. As a Brazilian I loved this feeling of home but in the end it really wasn’t and if I was a native Portuguese I would likely be at minimum somewhat bothered. They’re much more internationally adapted though and the Portuguese even talk in English between themselves without this being a problem, so if the English tourists aren’t a problem then Brazilian ones shouldn’t as well.

Idk, I put myself on their shoes by what it feels like being in Rio during New Year, with gringos stacking up the beach and I absolutely hate it while otherwise LOVING the same area during the year (even with some level of tourists speaking Spanish or English there!). And that’s because it’s still not on the level of same tourist places in Southern Europe, mainly Spain; France and Italy. Probably Greece too but I don’t know much about tourism there.

I love the current small levels of tourism in Brazil that the only place that gets unbearable with excessive stacking up of tourists is the Southern Zone of Rio during New Year and mayyybe around Carnaval (which still does not bother me like New Year because it’s a time that is inevitably unbearable with or without tourists anyway). If it was something similar to Mexico or Europe - who get a LOT of foreigners visiting - the nationalist in me would 100% jump out and scream “Gringos go home”.

[wnwnwn]

The problems of housing are either
Just housing problems (maybe related to crime or transportation, along a lot of issues)
Or inmigration problems (ex-pats and econ-refugees are different, but both affect the housing market).
Ex pats are not tourist.

Enviromental protections are necessary and there should be controls on the sale of land to foreigners.

In Peru, I feel that sometimes foreigner tourists think they have free pass in some things, specially in Cusco. But the solution to that is... (fair) policing.

I think that there should be limitations to built Hotels.com in certain areas, but not forbiddibg bew Hotels.com in a while city/metro area. I think they should ban new Hotels.com in Cusco district, but let them to built more in Wanchaq and other districts.

[LabourJersey]

That's why we need to visit under-touristed spots like Manchester, Belfast and Cleveland  /s

Though this does remind me of how weird it was to see the earlier surges of this movement when I went to Barcelona with family in November 2018. There were still a decent number of tourists despite being the off-season, and there was a not-insignificant amount of graffiti saying things like "tourists leave" or "this is our city" as the article notes. It's the only time I've felt as if I've burdened a place with my trip. Though as the affluent get more affluent (an underrated problem with income inequality is that there's more rich people!), and given how affluent people like to travel, i worry this tension in popular cities will only get worse.

[Red Velvet]

That's why we need to visit under-touristed spots like Manchester, Belfast and Cleveland  /s



Though this does remind me of how weird it was to see the earlier surges of this movement when I went to Barcelona with family in November 2018. There were still a decent number of tourists despite being the off-season, and there was a not-insignificant amount of graffiti saying things like "tourists leave" or "this is our city" as the article notes.

It's the only time I've felt as if I've burdened a place with my trip.

Though as the affluent get more affluent (an underrated problem with income inequality is that there's more rich people!), and given how affluent people like to travel, i worry this tension in popular cities will only get worse.

I lived in Barcelona around same time (2017-2018) and I think I remember even more of these anti-tourist stickers and grafittis in Lisbon than in Barcelona.

Though that’s probably I was a tourist in Lisbon and it was in those touristic spots that this anti-tourism stuff was concentrated. While in Barcelona I probably saw that stuff in the tourist spots but didn’t really absorb as much as I lived there and only went to them more occasionally, having a whole daily routine like the locals.

In Paris I was a tourist but I frankly don’t remember much of it like I do from Lisbon either. But maybe that’s because Paris is an ugly city with bad vibes so that’s what stayed in my mind, while Barcelona and Lisbon were wonderful.

From France, Provence and literally everywhere outside Paris is a dream visiting. Paris is smelly, unfriendly and with decadence vibes so my opinion wasn’t good to begin with and focus on anti-tourism signs.

[Electric Circus]

Overtourism is fair enough.

The locals feel excluded from their best amenities like restaurants and hotels.

It actually just means the countries in question have not planned for success. Tourism is one of the best economic growth sectors for any country.

It's renewable and sustainable, it makes your country look more attractive.

It might be good for economic growth, and it might be better than other strategies for achieving that, but nothing that relies on international air travel is renewable or sustainable. That's as much of a challenge as solving the quality of life issues that are causing this backlash.

[CumbrianLefty]

Of course the Lake District saw some of the earliest examples of this a century and more ago.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Excessive concentrations of tourists in vulnerable environments can be problematic and efforts should always be made at the dispersal of tourism across a wider area (it's better for everyone, including the tourists), but in the end this sort of thing is usually wildly hypocritical (often doubly so or even triply so) and can have quite a sinister edge. I'm aware of quite a few people who whinge about sEconD hOMeS in their patch and then bugger off to some crowded resort in a warmer country every Summer.

Housing issues in tourism hotspots, incidentally, are not usually caused by tourism. The sort of houses that become second homes or holiday cottages etc. are usually either houses that most locals could never have afforded anyway, or houses that no one wanted to live in (or, quite frequently, converted obsolete agricultural buildings etc). There have been (and are) exceptions, but it's usually something that local politicians like to point to to excuse their own failings.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

I live next to a handful of tiny villages that are visited by millions of tourists every year and I am not old enough to remember a time before mass tourism defined this area, so the broader debate is intimately familiar.

In general I am quite keen on the necessity to avoid overcrowding and disperse tourists more widely and aware of the challenges of sustainability, in our and many cases ecological just as much as anthropic. Beyond that, I can't help considering how many of the questions raised by this discussion are so to speak philosophical: what distinguishes a "good tourist" from a "bad tourist", what is the value of authenticity or local character, who even counts as a tourist in the first place (am I a tourist when I go to the Cinque Terre, which I keep referencing? can someone be a tourist in their own city?). Indeed the most sympathetic I am to the movements in question is out of disdain for categories of "bad tourists", explicitly mentioned in the article about Amsterdam dissuading people from coming just to get smashed. Still I am instinctively distrustful of anti-tourist slogans - if anything because I love to travel myself! - Al put it well talking about a sinister edge.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

One of the issues is that the economic impact of tourism is that it creates a lot of low-paid seasonal jobs which are held by a mixture of foreign or very young workers who generally aren't vocal about the issues. It's a unique economic phenomena where the benefit doesn't really flow to middle-class people.

[Zinneke]

Excessive concentrations of tourists in vulnerable environments can be problematic and efforts should always be made at the dispersal of tourism across a wider area (it's better for everyone, including the tourists), but in the end this sort of thing is usually wildly hypocritical (often doubly so or even triply so) and can have quite a sinister edge. I'm aware of quite a few people who whinge about sEconD hOMeS in their patch and then bugger off to some crowded resort in a warmer country every Summer.

Housing issues in tourism hotspots, incidentally, are not usually caused by tourism. The sort of houses that become second homes or holiday cottages etc. are usually either houses that most locals could never have afforded anyway, or houses that no one wanted to live in (or, quite frequently, converted obsolete agricultural buildings etc). There have been (and are) exceptions, but it's usually something that local politicians like to point to to excuse their own failings.

This post would get my reccomend but for that fact that applies to a pre-AirBnb/Booking.com world.

The idea that that hasn't had an impact on the rental stock is absurd.

[It’s so Joever]

Tourism is an industry like any other that needs to be regulated to reduce market externalities. There is a middle ground answer between closing off to tourists entirely and day, preventing cruise ships from docking in certain ports to protect a UNESCO site.

[Zinneke]

Excessive concentrations of tourists in vulnerable environments can be problematic and efforts should always be made at the dispersal of tourism across a wider area (it's better for everyone, including the tourists), but in the end this sort of thing is usually wildly hypocritical (often doubly so or even triply so) and can have quite a sinister edge. I'm aware of quite a few people who whinge about sEconD hOMeS in their patch and then bugger off to some crowded resort in a warmer country every Summer.

Housing issues in tourism hotspots, incidentally, are not usually caused by tourism. The sort of houses that become second homes or holiday cottages etc. are usually either houses that most locals could never have afforded anyway, or houses that no one wanted to live in (or, quite frequently, converted obsolete agricultural buildings etc). There have been (and are) exceptions, but it's usually something that local politicians like to point to to excuse their own failings.

This post would get my reccomend but for that fact that applies to a pre-AirBnb/Booking.com world.

The idea that that hasn't had an impact on the rental stock is absurd.

Let me go into a little more depth : I imagine Al’s main experience comes from Wales which is a tourist hotspot for sure but it is very different to the problems Spain and other similar countries are facing with its housing market. There’s basically a macro-issue and a micro-issue. The macro-issue is that with the advent of globalization and capital transfers, as well as the ridiculous laws allowing one to get a passport if they bought enough property (this is now gone), Spain’s housing market essentially became a secure asset that can also double as a holiday home.

Why is AirBnb/booking.com important in this? Because it also means one can “justify” that appartment being empty more often than not, as they just say they “rent it out” by putting it on AirBnb and ensuring once in a while some tourists come in and therefore justify its existence as an otherwise empty flat. Al is right that this is a problem with the inept political class in these cases. What he and many others won’t blame though is the higher political class (your Bill Clintons, your Tony Blairs, and all the other fake progressives who sold us globalisation as a wonderful thing) overall macroeconomic ultra-liberal, ultra-submissive model of allowing Europe, and big fashionable European cities, to essentially turn into asset-class as opposed to places to live, and that mass tourism is the perfect veil to hide this blatant political decision, since their end goal is basically a class of frequent flyers who jet set around the world trafficking underaged women while renting out AirBnbs off of a rich investor who does the same.  Those are the people to blame for this situation, not the local politicians who are just small time crooks, goombah-men for the Tony Blair Institute, Emily in Paris producing World Economic Forum types who created this economic system and condemned Europe to be a deindustrialized vehicle for global capital to be stored but not used.


Second, the micro-issues, which is that now the average local housing investor, building company and whatnot, even without the influence of John Chinaman trying to escape Xi Jingping, or Russian Vlad trying to escape the ruble, the local investors will still allocate resources towards higher value housing over social housing in the areas of the city where the most activity happens, because tourists don’t like to commute, and they don’t want decrepit apartments. This creates a ripple effect, it pushes the creative classes out into the working class periphery of the city, which then pushes these out into commuter towns, which drives up costs across the region. It’s why when Barcelona becomes a Disneyland, with entire districts like Nova Esquerra de Eixample full of AirBNB and rental flats when it used to be your classic creatives/LGBT district (and before that, a slum), this also has an impact on rents in Terrassa, Sabadell, L’Hospitalet, i.e the classic working class commuter cities, because masses of citizens of Barcelona migrate there.

Now, I’ve used rental flats, they are very useful, but clearly they are now excellent fonts for Blackrock or other investment companies that are there to essentially turn Europe into a safe haven for sitting capital. There is one guy called Nacho in Seville that has 161 apartments that he rents out to tourists

https://andaluciainformacion.es/andalucia/1639516/un-solo-propietario-alquila-161-de-las-7158-viviendas-turisticas-de-airbnb-en-sevilla/

He is either a money launderer who doesn’t have 161 apartments to rent out on Airbnb but pretends to to justify his drug money income, or he is doing this for Blackrock or another such type of company for russians, chinamen who are understandably scared of their government.

All of this corruption is only possible because of mass tourism. For financial crime analysts this is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Coastal Wales is far more “manageable” for whoever investigates it, than millions of tourists every summer in the places we are talking about. So everyone should be extremely wary of the drawbacks of having a mass tourist city. And yes, going to a Club Med resort in Turkey is more ethical than the above, despite the obvious problems it has too.

[Steve from Lambeth]

Some unrelated points before I start on the concentrations...

It is striking that the Daily Express's reporting of the April 20th protests is better than the Reuters reporting. They say that a protest was also organised in London by Canarians in the UK, a group which is apparently an impartial expat community but is in fact a front for people who have moved from the Canary Islands to the UK to warn Brits who want to visit the islands about how bad the tourist experience has proven for them. The authorities are taking their concerns seriously.

I remember that, before coronavirus, British tourists to Spain got a bad rap for generally being obnoxious. Then around 2019, the German tourists got into the kinds of fight over beach loungers which you'd usually see us lot partaking in and everyone just forgot about it. It's interesting to see that the focus has changed from tourists (regardless of numbers) being bad to tourists (regardless of behaviour) coming in extraordinary numbers. I'm surprised that nobody has accused anti-tourism campaigners of being part of the elusive "lockdown forever" set.

Around 2023, Simon Calder - I think - went on a couple of daytime TV programs on the UK to discuss tourism to North Macedonia. The Express ran fairly heavily on this theme and I know that Esther Marshall, their de-facto head of tourism journalism, visited that summer, but I have no idea the final impact as to visitor numbers. The prospect in itself is tempting (not only because it's very rare that you see  next to someone's name on the forums) and I suppose I could get there in an afternoon* but I trust my parents more and, while they are able, I'm not sure they'd be willing.

*: Greek speed limit signs are famously nominal in vast parts of the country, despite the ubiquity of "police enforcement camera" warnings. It's therefore hard to say whether it would be more of a leisurely Sunday afternoon or a hurried just-got-off-work-and-need-to-get-the-children-from-school afternoon.

Calder has nominated Bulgaria as 2024's tribute. It's noteworthy that neither country has seen the kinds of overtourism protest prevalent in most Western, non-Anglophone countries (the English-speaking world largely endures it without complain) and both have some of the internet's most well-documented radio-station-by-location listings.

All the information I have suggests that the Dubrovnik wheelie law has been enforced for six months. Obviously the main targets (and obviously the main source of people who wheel their luggage) are air and cruise arrivals. But how are the local authorities enforcing this against (i.e.) people arriving by car or otherwise? I imagine it would be difficult, if not impossible, to enforce a white-glove luggage service for disembarkants of every single vehicle.

The leader of Bali has, in recent months, variously threatened a hefty "tourist tax" (implemented in February), a ban on tourists renting motorcycles (still just an idea), and a requirement that anyone wanting to visit the island apply a year in advance (still just an idea). I believe he also wanted to restrict access to Buddhist temples on the island, but can't quite remember if he did or if I'm just having a fever dream.

Something left totally unmentioned in this entire discussion - and by all of my favourite websites other than the Express and, of all places, the Gateway Pundit - was the decision taken a few weeks ago to "ban" anyone from visiting Kyoto's geisha district and fine them ¥10,000 if they're foolhardy enough anyway. This is a completely unprecedented measure to take for a historic tourist hotspot (this is the first time I'll call a rule "unprecedented" and it won't be the last), and perhaps for a major district in any major world city. I have no idea how enforcement is going: we know it's part of the municipal rules in theory, but the fines for photography that were already in place appear to have been levied rarely in practice so I doubt this crackdown is going full-force either.

TGP has another unlikely British co-conspirator. The BBC reported on Christiana Freetown's efforts to rid its marijuana parlors a few months after Paul Serran went on one of his usual rants against crime in the Copenhagen district. (Although I stress that the two articles were, this time, completely unrelated.)


Shortly after the second election of 2023, the Culture Minister went on Greek talk radio to defend the imposition of daily visitor caps on the Parthenon site on the grounds of overtourism. (The announcement was made about a week after the publication of the Forbes article linked in OP, which noted only that visits were being time-limited and didn't go into any further detail.)

This was an extraordinary intervention even by Mitsotakis and Co's already sloppy standards - Greece is already one of Europe's biggest tourist destinations and I am fairly confident this was not one of their campaign promises. The government could have promoted ex-hotspot tourism, limited cruise numbers - cruise tourists being the folk demons in this case - or even increased charges. They did this instead.

It's well worth noting that the Parthenon is the one place in Greece where the signs read "please do not put too much paper down the toilet" rather than "do not put paper in the toilet" (that's not because the plumbing is better) and the tourist attraction where I've most feared falling off the staircase and breaking multiple bones. Still not as great a scam as the Acropolis Museum, which is somehow only the third most interesting building on the street after McDonald's and the Spanish embassy.

I will insert the same caveat into this point that I'm inserting into many of my other points: I have no idea how many people are being turned away because of this. My visit was in March 2023, a few days before Talk Elections started ruining my life, and reporting at the time suggested that only a few thousand people a day would be affected. (That, and it's Greece.) Even now, residents of Plaka are concerned that cruise tourists are just wasting their time in the local area instead.

Straits Times: Too much tourism sparks backlash in Spain (2024-04-17)

I think the real story here is that Barcelona's municipal government convinced Google to delist one of the bus routes they operate because too many tourists were using it. This is another intervention which, to my awareness, is both unprecedented and one of the least optimal solutions to the problem at issue.

I've seen news about the Plaza de Espana development in the Daily Express, which has become an increasingly good source for travel journalism despite one of their authors (Alessandra Scotto di Santolo, now largely stood down in favour of the significantly more original Aimee Robinson) being heavily reliant on AI and Marshall being a somewhat weaselly-worded reporter. It is astonishing that it is considered news in most European countries while the charges to enter Oxford Cathedral, for instance, are considered only with ridicule, and only by a few local correspondents.

Long post

In my case, on the other hand, I would probably not be aware of anti-tourism if not for news reports and other internet coverage of it.

am I a tourist when I go to the Cinque Terre, which I keep referencing? can someone be a tourist in their own city?

1: Yes. I consider myself doing tourism when I visit some ancient landmarks a few miles from my house.
2: No - although I have largely not lived in cities, so I'm not sure I'm well-qualified to comment, and in any case I can't really quantify the difference between "tourism" and "looking around attractions in your city in your free time."

There’s basically a macro-issue and a micro-issue. The macro-issue is that with the advent of globalization and capital transfers, as well as the ridiculous laws allowing one to get a passport if they bought enough property (this is now gone), Spain’s housing market essentially became a secure asset that can also double as a holiday home.

UN human rights experts were warning against golden visa schemes before coronavirus, although I forget the exact grounds. I'm surprised it took the fear of Russian oligarchs buying their way into EU citizenship for them to be rolled back to any extent, never mind almost entirely.

[T]he higher political class (your Bill Clintons, your Tony Blairs, and all the other fake progressives who sold us globalisation as a wonderful thing)... are the people to blame for this situation, not the local politicians who are just small time crooks, goombah-men for the Tony Blair Institute, Emily in Paris producing World Economic Forum types who created this economic system and condemned Europe to be a deindustrialized vehicle for global capital to be stored but not used.

Lily Collins did nothing wrong. If my (future) wife or daughter looked like her, I'd be thankful. If she was like her, then doubly so. The WEF, however, has done almost everything wrong for reasons that would be better explained in another thread at another time; it started making the right noises on some issues at the start of 2023 and I had (and still have) hope they will improve, but this has mostly not happened in much more recent times.

Now, I’ve used rental flats...

As have I, although I blame my parents for this. The next and only time I will voluntarily choose to live in one will be if I'm working in a city much, much larger than Truro and fancy living somewhere that's relatively close to everything. I could see myself buying or long-term renting a flat in some city centre, somewhere (or a house anywhere, more generally). I could not see myself treating one as though it were a hotel room. If I wanted to stay somewhere that felt like a hotel room, I would book one.

[𝕭𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖆 𝕸𝖎𝖓𝖔𝖑𝖆]

Around 2023, Simon Calder - I think - went on a couple of daytime TV programs on the UK to discuss tourism to North Macedonia. The Express ran fairly heavily on this theme and I know that Esther Marshall, their de-facto head of tourism journalism, visited that summer, but I have no idea the final impact as to visitor numbers. The prospect in itself is tempting (not only because it's very rare that you see  next to someone's name on the forums) and I suppose I could get there in an afternoon* but I trust my parents more and, while they are able, I'm not sure they'd be willing.

Interestingly, North Macedonia is exactly (one of the various places) where I went on holiday in the summer of 2023. It was beautiful and really underrated, and will probably stay that way since I don't know enough people for my comment to be a plausible contribution to overtourism. I admit I am quite confused by your post overall but I just wanted to let this out.

[Steve from Lambeth]

Nobody knows enough people to make anywhere too crowded. Well, unless that somewhere is Area 51, circa October 2017. Also Simon and Esther hold far more sway over the average Brit than you do over the average Italian

[Steve from Lambeth]

And if you thought any of the above measures were pushing the envelope...