By EJ Katz
In the post-pandemic era, the demand to get away and travel to a faraway city is stronger than ever. After a brief lull in travel during COVID-19’s peak, travelers are seeking to make up for lost time, and they are facilitated by cheap flights and encouraged by the rise of social media. The impacts have been extreme and sudden – with the word “overtourism” quickly becoming a buzzword in just the past few years.
Nowhere is this influx of travellers felt more acutely than in Europe. According to the latest UN Tourism report, Europe saw 747 million tourist arrivals in 2024, miles ahead of the next highest region, Asia and the Pacific, which hosted 316 million arrivals. Although intra-European travel is the predominant source of tourism in Europe, Americans play a significant role. Twenty-two million Americans visited Europe in 2024, a figure that has more than doubled since 2010. These arrivals are globally unevenly distributed, and further unevenly distributed within Europe. France and Spain received the most visitors in 2023, with 100 million and eighty-five million respectively – with most of these tourists concentrated in just a handful of cities such as Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona. How are cities handling this massive influx of visitors? Can cities’ physical and social fabrics remain resilient in the face of such immense pressure?
Barcelona
Barcelona is the prime example of a city suffering from overtourism, dating back to its revitalization prior to the 1992 Olympics. With its industrial capacity, particularly in textiles, declining due to new technologies, competition from global markets, and strain from the 1973 Oil Crisis, the city used the Olympics as an opportunity to revitalize formerly industrial areas, creating public spaces and waterfront access. These efforts greatly improved the quality of life for many in Barcelona and they also attracted tourists. Flash forward to today, and the Barcelona region receives more than 26 million tourists a year with a metro area population of just 5.7 million.
The problems and implications of overtourism encompass all areas of urban planning, especially housing. The rise of AirBnB has led to international investors snatching up properties. For example, in popular tourist neighborhoods like Barcelona’s Exiample, there is one tourist apartment for every fifty-seven residents. The housing crunch is especially acute in Barcelona and Spain as a whole compared to other European countries facing similar overtourism. Part of this can be explained by the difference in public housing stock. Heavily-touristed countries like France and the Netherlands have 14% and 34% public housing stock, respectively, compared to Spain’s meager 2.5%. In Barcelona, these circumstances have led to a 68% increase in rent over the past decade.
Barcelona’s previous mayoral administration under Ada Colau responded to these conditions by instituting measures such as a new hotel ban and a tourist tax. The current administration, under Mayor Jaume Collboni, has pledged not to renew short-term lease licenses which end in 2028, and to close cruise terminals by 2030. The city council also recently had a bus route removed from Google Maps, as it had been previously so packed with tourists that it was unusable for locals.
Many have a hard time believing that the short-term lease and cruise terminal closures will come to pass. Daniel Pardo Rivacoba is a member of the Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth (ABDT), an organization formed in 2015 in response to the housing and overtourism crisis. “Both of them are just promises,” he said regarding the above policies. In regards to short-term rentals, the 2028 date would put this decision in the hands of the next mayor. Even if these promises were kept, Rivacoba said that these apartments would remain out of reach of the average Barcelona resident unless the move was paired with policies that ensured the apartments return to affordability. He also doesn’t have much faith in the cruise ship license ban in 2030. “The city council only has one seat at the table…there’s so many other interests that won’t agree,” he said. Confirming his suspicions, Barcelona opened a new cruise port this year, likely locking in cruise traffic for the foreseeable future.
When asked if there are any cities in Europe that Rivacoba thinks are managing tourism well, the answer was a resounding “no.” No city as of yet is seriously pursuing a degrowth agenda in regards to tourism, he said. What ABDT would like to see is a commitment to fewer tourists, not just better management of an ever-increasing numbers of visitors. In his view, even an equitable redistribution of revenue from tourism would not eliminate the other negative impacts from tourism, like overcrowding, lack of housing, and loss of neighborhood functions.
Yet he thinks there are some examples worth following. For example, Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is slowly reducing the number of flights it will allow. Rivacoba feared even this meager effort would face immense backlash, a fear which has since been realized as the Dutch government has agreed to allow 475,000 to 480,000 flights annually – down from the initial 460,000 goal. Schiphol’s efforts mirror ABDT and other local organizations’ successful efforts to fight the expansion of Barcelona’s El Prat airport in 2018, an effort Rivacoba recalls fondly while recognizing that the fight is not over. He also pointed to a Green Party proposal in Germany which went as far as suggesting limitations on the number of flights individuals could take per year, or at a minimum taxing short-haul flights highly to encourage train journeys instead. The idea of limiting flights that individuals can take, although highly unlikely, would be “the only way to make tourism degrowth not classist,” Rivacoba said, highlighting a major conundrum when it comes to managing overtourism. The central tools that have been proposed: tourist taxes, limiting short-term rentals, promoting longer stays in destinations — all make tourism less accessible to those with less money.
The current relative accessibility of tourism is partially a result of hidden costs. Rivacoba points to the fact that jet fuel is heavily subsidized for European travel. Public dollars also go towards promotion for tourism, an effort that, if ended, he believes would be very symbolic of the Barcelona or Catalan government taking tourism degrowth seriously. Is the goal simply to make tourism more expensive, leading to a decrease in visitors? Where does the tourist factor into this?
The Tourist’s Side
When asked for his thoughts on reaching tourists, and potentially changing their behavior, Rivacoba seemed doubtful. “What we need to change is the tourism production and not the tourism consumption,” he argued, but questions remain surrounding why tourists choose to travel and what they’re seeking when they travel. Americans visiting Europe are travelling thousands of miles and spending their disposable income to experience walkable neighborhoods. Travelers often claim to be seeking authenticity in other cities, something that can not quite be defined, but they are convinced does not exist in their own cities.
This realization is neither unique nor new. An essay in Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, a pioneering 1989 work studying the new phenomenon of mass-tourism, came to this similar conclusion: The middle class tourists’ “thirst for cultural authenticity seems at once a recognition of the supposed cultural impoverishment that has accompanied economic success…” and the experience of tourism provides “an opportunity for a limited self-criticism…a kind of pseudo-tragedy in which the affluence that makes touring possible is the very cause of the loss of cultural authenticity.”
The imperialistic nature of tourism has long been noted, as host countries bend to the desires and demands of foreign tourists. To quote again from Hosts and Guests, “the North American vacationer who insists on American fast-food hamburgers, coffee with his meals, hot running water in his bedroom and the use of the English language is a familiar image.” In this view, the tourists’ perspective needs to be considered, as their demands directly impact conditions in the host country. At a certain point the tourists’ desires become privileged over the residents’ needs. Therefore, ABDT’s goal of tourism degrowth is understandable. Barcelona has likely surpassed its tourism carrying capacity. Is the answer ultimately no tourism? Probably not. But maybe a solution exists back in the U.S.
Americans deserve more “authentic” cities at home. It’s noted in Hosts and Guests that travelling is socially sanctioned, even valorized, while staying at home during one’s time off is seen as “doing nothing.” Anthropologist Denish Nash asks, “Is it possible that the principal psychological consequence of tourism for the metropolitan side is an awakening or heightening of discontent? (They’ll never get me to go back to Indianapolis!)”. There’s a common theme on social media where Americans, upon returning from Europe, try sitting outside at their local cafe, trying to recreate their experience abroad, only to find themselves on a noisy busy street or in a parking lot. Should Americans accept that their cities will be permanently lackluster and “inauthentic”? Maybe if they were not Americans would not be compelled to fly thousands of miles to experience something that instead was just down the block.
EJ Katz is a Master’s in Urban Planning student at Hunter College interested in all things transportation and resiliency planning. With a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Tufts University, he is also interested in planning in different contexts, and learning about issues facing cities outside of the United States. EJ has lived and worked in Brooklyn for four years.
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