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Anti-tourism protests have spread across Europe this summer, with demonstrations in the Netherlands, Greeceand of course Spain.
In early July, demonstrators marched through popular tourist areas in the Spanish city Barcelona spraying unsuspecting visitors with water guns while chanting ‘tourists go home’.
And most recently, thousands protested on the Spanish island of Mallorca, with organizers claiming the island’s tourism model “impoverishes workers and enriches only a few.”
Comedian claims Europe is ‘over’
In response to the growing unrest, an American comedian has shared a controversial rant on TikTok, claiming Europe is ‘over’ and telling locals ‘you are our Disney World now’.
“I’ve seen a lot of news about how local Europeans are angry that tourists are just ruining their cities, and they’re complaining, and they’re spraying the water,” Dan Mahboubian Rosen said in the clip (you can watch above).
“You had a lot of fun colonizing the world, plundering and extracting wealth to create your nice little squares and palaces. So now you have to accept that you are just museum cities,” he added.
He said Europeans should thank tourists for visiting, and many people seemed to agree with his views in the comments.
“As someone who has ventured across Europe I can’t believe how relevant this is,” one person wrote.
But others disagreed: “Tourism drives up prices so high for locals that they can’t afford to live in their own town.”
Backlash against overtourism
At the center of the protests is the growing problem of rising rents and house prices, which have made owning a home almost impossible for some residents.
Carlos Ramirez, a teacher in Barcelona, northeastern Spain, has been saving for his first house for years and earns a “decent” state salary, he says.
But prices in the Catalan capital are soaring and 26-year-old Ramirez fears he will be driven out.
“Everyone I know lives here,” he told CNN. “But the only way you can afford to live in Barcelona now is to share with two, three, four people.”
Like other residents of southern Europe whose cities double as popular summer destinations, Ramirez places much of the blame for rising costs on one thing: mass tourism.
“It is becoming increasingly difficult for locals, especially young people, to have their own place,” he said. “As the years went by, more and more tourists came.”
According to Mayor Jaume Collboni, rents in Barcelona have risen by 68 percent in the past decade – a pattern mirrored in other European cities.
Many residents have had enough. Some have taken extreme measures to make their voices heard, with locals demonstrating against excessive tourism in Spain’s Canary Islands and calling for a hunger strike as early as April.
When anti-tourism protesters began firing water guns at visitors in Barcelona city center on July 6, a moment that attracted international attention, Ramirez said he could feel “the resentment” in the air.
Building resentment
He said he was pleased that so many residents had joined the demonstration, which the Barcelona city council said around 2,800 people took part in.
“A lot of people, a lot of companies, are now warning tourists against visiting Spain because of hostility and things like that. Honestly, I think it worked,” Ramirez said, reflecting on the protests’ ability to deter tourists from visiting the city. city.
Antje Martins, a sustainable tourism expert from the University of Queensland, said the reputational impact of such protests could influence where tourists decide to travel.
“Barcelona now has a very bad reputation with other tourists who don’t want to visit because they are afraid,” she said.
But Eduardo Santander, CEO of the European Travel Commission, a nonprofit organization responsible for promoting Europe as a travel destination, suggests that incidents such as the Barcelona protests are “isolated” and do not “reflect the full reality of Spain or Europe.” “
Overall, Martins believes this is not a clash between tourists and residents.
“To me they are a broader reflection of tourism not being managed sustainably,” she said.
“When I see these clashes where residents are rebelling against tourism… I think that’s a reflection of the fact that they are not happy because they are not getting any benefit from the tourism that they see,” she added .
Ramirez agrees with this sentiment.
“I can empathize with them, we are not blaming the tourists directly,” he said. “We want to put pressure on our government to change policy.”
The key issues at play here are structural and not personal, Martins said.
Residents who are overpriced due to unsustainable levels of tourism tend to receive lower wages and some work in the tourism industry itself, she added.
Take action
In some European cities, local authorities are taking bold action in an attempt to control tourism levels.
Officials in Venice recently hailed a temporary entrance fee aimed at regulating tourist numbers as a success.
The new tourist tax of €5 (about $8), which started on April 25 and ended on July 14, raised over €2.4 million (approximately $3.2 million), significantly more than expected, according to Venice Mayor Luigi Brugnaro.
Some residents told a CNN team on the scene that crowds, while still busy, seemed smaller during the plan. But others disagree.
Susanna Polloni, of the Venice-based group Solidarity Network for Housing, told CNN that the tax is “not only useless, but also harmful” because it conjures up in the international imagination the idea of a “Venice country” where you have to get a ticket buy. enter.
Polloni adds that mass tourism has already closed health care facilities, replaced convenience stores with souvenir shops and sent house prices soaring in the Italian canal city.
“We are about to reach a point of no return,” Polloni said. “We think our cry for help, from a city dying for the profit of a few, should reach the whole world.”
Despite the backlash from some, more and more cities in Europe are following suit, and some are even looking to follow suit expand their tourist tax.
Barcelona Mayor Jaume Collboni recently announced that he wants to increase the city’s tourist tax for some cruise passengers.
Tourists visiting the city for less than 12 hours usually add to the crowds at key attractions such as the Sagrada Familia, the Las Ramblas pedestrian walkway in the Gothic Quarter and at Gaudi’s Guëll hillside park, the city’s news agency told CNN.
The current tourist tax is Barcelona’s third-largest source of funding, raising around €100 million (about $165 million) last year from cruise passengers – who pay €6.25 (about $10) to enter the city – and other visitors who staying in hotels and other tourist accommodations.
Collboni said he wants that too Terminal licenses for approximately 10,000 apartments currently approved for short-term rentalsthe press service said.
‘Demarketing campaigns’
It’s not just housing issues that have caused a backlash against tourists, Ramirez said, adding that the disrespectful behavior of some has also played a role.
In Florence, Italy, a young woman was recently filmed kissing, fucking and grinding against a statue of Bacchus, the god of wine and sensuality. The mayor’s office called it an act that “mimicked sex.”
And in 2023, a tourist was accused of damaging a statue in the city’s 16th-century Neptune Fountain, located in Piazza della Signoria.
The same year, in another part of Italy, a group of tourists was accused of toppling a valuable statue at a villa.
Bad tourist behavior is also a problem in other parts of Europe, including Barcelona, Mallorca, Magaluf and Benidorm, Ramirez said.
“It seems like they are doing here what they cannot do in their own country,” he told CNN. “We feel very offended.”
Sebastian Zenker, professor of tourism at Copenhagen Business School, explains how incidents like this have led to some cities running ‘de-marketing campaigns’, which aim to discourage certain tourists from visiting.
Zenker points to 2023 in Amsterdam Campaign ‘Stay Away’which targeted male visitors between the ages of 18 and 35 with advertisements warning them of the consequences of antisocial behavior.
“That was a very harsh and strict way of de-marketing,” he told CNN. “It hasn’t stopped bachelor parties, but it has created awareness that this city has changed the rules.”
However, efforts to attract more cultural tourists could have unintended consequences, Zenker says.
“If you raise prices and attract more wealthy people, it solves the crowding effect, but at the same time it increases inflation and the gentrification problem.”
In Mallorca, prices have gone ‘super crazy’ after many activities for ‘drinking tourists’ were banned, says Zenker.
Much of the money raised will not end up back in the hands of local communities, he added.
So, what’s the solution?
“It’s about making sure that the money made by tourists, or with tourists, is invested in the place and in jobs so that people can afford to live,” he said.
“This [the protests] will continue until we find equilibrium again.”
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