The yawning gap between locals’ and visitors’ consumption is stoking long-standing resentments ahead of an election.
As rain poured into Catalonia’s parched capital, the tourists did, too.
Yet while a damp April brought some relief to the drought-stricken Spanish region — which has been living under rain-starved skies for over three years — the crescendoing tourist season did not.
After all, spring is when visitors start spilling into Barcelona’s streets each morning from cruise ships, hotels and Airbnbs — and consuming considerably more of the city’s water than the average resident, threatening to push Barcelona’s water supply to the breaking point.
The disconnect has locals fulminating. While Catalan municipalities have faced water consumption limits since the region declared a drought emergency in early February, the tourism sector has largely escaped restrictions.
It’s as if nothing could be done about it. One country blames tourists, others immigrants. In Netherlands the most popular party said for ages that it’s useless to plan ahead. Such remarks are ignored. People go for the populist remarks. Blame some group of people.
I don’t think you’re envisioning physics in many of these situations. Might not be the case in Barcelona which is pretty big and growable but let me give you another example to point out why that generalization doesn’t stick. I’m from nearby Sesimbra, a 5k pop village in a very very cool-looking place.
If I had to bet, Sesimbra receives like 50k tourists a month, many of which want to stay in hotels and tents and illegal caravans. If one expands Sesimbra, the beauty of the place gets destroyed for everyone. If one does not, the fisherman (yes, it is a fishing village) are now competing with 50k other fellas for land, in a village that can’t sustain any other industry.
Even if you tax the hell of tourists and only a fifth keeps going, that is already too many. It literally is destroying both the nature and the livelihood of people that were there for centuries.
I get the idea that people want to see fancy places and we don’t have that many Sesimbras in the world, but this massification is basically forbidding people from living anywhere that happens to be pretty and has a good weather. The richer tourists stay in the hotels (which lay on top of bulldozed homes) and the locals are now 20km away because physics couldn’t care less. 50k ain’t gonna stay in that tiny valley, people do not fit.
We have huge chunks of the coastal dunes destroyed (and those take a long time to recover) because of such misuse and overuse. Everyone wants to go to the beach and everyone wants to have resorts or whatever, and yet the places and the populations are taking very hard beatings. No amount of policy making solves some of those situations given that you can’t just have quotas of people allowed to visit a city within the EU. The entire region of Algarve is a disaster.
And yes, there are airports with tourist taxes, but Portugal doesn’t have all that many airports. These villages (Sesimbra, Sintra, Ericeira…) are serviced by the same airport as Lisbon. Can’t hit tourists with a tax without hitting businesses and others.