Europeans are angry about tourists, but they’re blaming the wrong people

Spain has a problem with tourists. There are too many, in too few places, and they’re behaving badly. And, if you believe the protesters who have been making noise recently, they’re causing a housing crisis.

This all came to a head a few weeks ago when footage emerged of protesters in Barcelona firing water pistols at hapless tourists sitting outside a Taco Bell, many of whom had to flee in the face of the aquatic onslaught.

Locals in Barcelona are taking their anger at overtourism out on visitors, but they’re targeting the wrong people.Credit: Bloomberg

No one wins in a situation like this. The protesters look bad because they’re picking on people who aren’t harming them directly and are just trying to have a nice holiday. The tourists look bad because, come on, you came all the way to Barcelona to eat at Taco Bell?

And, perhaps most of all, Barcelona looks bad because clearly someone in the government there gave the green light to open a Taco Bell.

This incident was the culmination of weeks of protests in Spain – and indeed years of protests around Europe – against the creep of mass tourism and the knock-on effects of overtourism in the likes of Barcelona, Malaga, Mallorca and the Canary Islands.

Those marching in the streets in Barcelona have been carrying signs saying, “Tourists go home, you are not welcome”, while locals in Mallorca have put up fake warning signs (in English) on some of their favourite beaches showing pictures of jellyfish and falling rocks, in an attempt to turn foreigners away.

Anti-tourist graffiti in Mallorca.Credit: Bloomberg

Plenty of protesters say that their issue is with government authorities and their lack of regulations rather than the tourists themselves. However, when you’re walking the streets in your “Tourists go home” T-shirt, squirting water at people just trying to have lunch, that’s a little hard to believe.

These make for interesting times for anyone planning to travel to Europe over the next few months, particularly to the Spanish hotspots, not to mention the famously overtouristed likes of Venice, Amsterdam, Prague and Lisbon.

Anti-tourist sentiment is real, though. The main beef protesters in Spain seem to have right now is the rising cost of housing and the inability of locals to remain living in the cities they have helped to shape into the uber-popular attractions they are today.

Rents for Barcelona residents have increased 68 per cent in the last 10 years, according to the city’s mayor. In response, the local government has announced a plan to ban short-term rentals such as Airbnb entirely in the city by 2029.

Tourists visit the Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona.Credit: Bloomberg

But hang on a second. To Australians, particularly those in Sydney and Melbourne, this might sound familiar. Property prices are skyrocketing here as well, making our largest cities notoriously unaffordable. Rents in Sydney have increased by 54 per cent in the last decade. In Melbourne, it’s almost 58 per cent.

Can we blame tourists, too? Well, no. The situation is far more complicated than that, just as the reality in Spain is more complicated than the anti-tourism protesters would like to believe.

There are, for example, a little over 10,000 homes in Barcelona legally registered as rentals for tourists (that’s 0.77 per cent of the city’s residential stock); by comparison, in Sydney, there are almost 23,000 rentals on Airbnb, which is 1.2 per cent of dwellings. It’s not clear that even a total ban on Airbnb will make much difference.

Tourists are an easy target – the scary foreigners taking your home – though that’s partly because visitors do, undoubtedly, cause problems in Spain and the rest of Europe, and they are changing the make-up of the places they love through their sheer numbers.

But that’s not what these Spanish protests are about. They’re about housing, and the effect of tourism on that housing market is questionable at best.

There are other issues in Spain that are clearly tourism-related, but I would still argue that the solution is not for tourists to go home because that’s just not going to happen.

The solution is two-pronged: for travellers to behave more respectfully and move more thoughtfully; and for government authorities to better manage the onslaught, to figure out ways to allow locals to remain living in these places and enjoying their lives and to share in the benefits of tourism, rather than being trampled.

Casey Merwood, founder of Spain-specialist tour company Biznaga, agrees that tourist behaviour needs to change.

“I was there recently,” she says, “and I spoke to every restaurant owner, every taxi driver, every cafe owner, every hotel owner, and all of them were saying the same thing: the tourists who come in and do the right thing, and immerse themselves in the place, and buy locally and support local – they want those people.

“It’s the tourists who live their lives exactly the same way as they always have, they come in, they see 72 different places, they don’t immerse themselves in anything, they’re loud and obnoxious, just there to have a good time and not care what that means to the locals. That’s not OK.”

The solution in Spain is also to fix the housing crisis, though that’s a problem somewhat separate from tourism (and, Spanish friends, if you do figure it out – could you let us know?)

They’ll also need to sort out a few town-planning issues. Remember, those tourists were only eating at Taco Bell because someone in Barcelona said it was OK to open a Taco Bell. If the protesters are serious, they should seek that person out and give them a squirt.