Campaigners in at least a dozen tourist hotspots across southern Europe have taken to the streets to protest against “touristification”.
It is the most widespread joint action to date against what they see as the steady reshaping of their cities to meet the needs of tourists rather than people who live and work there.
Thousands turned out at marches in cities including Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca on Sunday, while others staged more symbolic actions. In the Italian port of Genoa, campaigners dragged a cardboard cruise ship through the old town’s narrow alleyways to show that tourism does not fit in the city.
A procession later on Sunday in Lisbon was due to involve a replica of St Anthony being “evicted” from his church and carried to the site of a prospective luxury hotel, to stress that even saints suffer from touristification.
In Barcelona, an estimated 600-800 demonstrators marched through the city centre chanting “Your holidays, my misery” and waving banners with slogans such as “Mass tourism kills the city” and “Their greed brings us ruin.”
Some fired water pistols, set off coloured flares and put “Neighbourhood self-defence, tourist go home” stickers on shop windows and hotels. Barcelona, a city of 1.6 million, drew 26 million tourists last year.
Threading through all the actions was a rallying cry for a rethink of a tourism model that campaigners say has increasingly funnelled profits into the hands of a few, while leaving locals to pay the price through soaring house prices and rents, environmental degradation and the proliferation of precarious, low-paying jobs.
The tensions around tourism burst into public view last year after tens of thousands of people protested in Spain’s most popular destinations. The bulk of Sunday’s protests took place in Spain, where tourist arrivals surged last year to record levels. Cities in Italy and Portugal also took part.
Despite the spate of fear-inducing headlines in some media, the aim was not to attack tourists, said Asier Basurto, a member of the “tourism degrowth” platform that organised a march in the Basque city of San Sebastián.
“People who go on vacation to one place or another are not our enemies, nor are they the target of our actions,” he said. “Let me be clear: our enemies are those who speculate on housing, who exploit workers and those who are profiting handsomely from the touristification of our cities.”
The seeds for the joint day of action were sown in April after groups from Spain, Italy, Portugal and France gathered in Barcelona for a days-long conference under the umbrella of the Southern European Network Against Touristification.
“When we started speaking to each other, it was amazing,” said María Cardona, of Canviem el Rumb, or Let’s Change Course, one of the groups behind Sunday’s march in Ibiza. “Despite the distance between us, we’re all grappling with a similar problem.”
In Ibiza, the march’s slogan was “the right to a dignified life”, said Cardona. “What does that mean when it comes to life on the island? There’s the right to water – we’re under restrictions, there’s a drought, they’ve cut off all the public fountains,” she added. “But villas, hotels and luxury homes continue to fill their pools as if there were no water restrictions.”
There was also the soaring cost of living that had left many workers living in vans, caravans or tents. “And another thing we’re seeing is that the traditional, historical names of places are being changed to English names that locals don’t know,” said Cardona. “It’s like the island’s DNA is being transformed.”
In Venice, locals protested against the lack of regulations that has allowed the number of short-term rentals to surge and hotels to tighten their grip on the housing market. “We’ve been emphasising for a couple of years now that there are more tourist beds than registered residents,” said Remi Wacogne of Ocio, a civic observatory on housing. “Tourism is physically and practically taking over homes.”
The steady shift had unleashed a wave of change in the city. “One of the main businesses that keeps opening up in Venice, in addition to bars and restaurants, is ATMs,” said Wacogne. “Which is also in a sense a metaphor of what is going on. So Venice is basically an ATM for a very restricted group of people, firms and investors who are allowed to make money just out of renting the place out to people.”
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The sentiment was echoed in Genoa, where residents organised a “noisy stroll” with their cardboard cruise ship to highlight the incongruence of tourism and local life. “We see tourism as a means to extract value from our cities and regions,” said one organiser, who asked not to be named. “We are not some sort of mine. This is a place where people live.”
Underpinning the joint action was a semantic shift. Rather than overtourism, which suggests that the solution lies in rolling back the number of tourists, the focus was on touristification, highlighting how hotspots are increasingly becoming commodified to be consumed by visitors, said Manuel Martin, of the Movement for a Housing Referendum, one of the groups organising the Lisbon action.
“So it’s a shift away from being a place that exists by and for the people that live and work there,” he added.
This has chipped away at the culture and social fabric of cities, added Martin, pointing to the shops and bookshops in Lisbon, some of them more than a century old, that have closed their doors after being priced out by rising rents. “It sort of excavates meaning from a place and turns it into a Disneyfied version of what it really is.”
After a handful of protesters bearing water guns squirted water at tourists last year in Barcelona, making headlines around the world, organisers in the city said they were encouraging people to bring water guns to Sunday’s march.
“But this needs to be contextualised,” said Daniel Pardo Rivacoba, of the Neighbourhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth. Last year’s incident was covered by tabloids and other media as though it was threatening or intimidating. “The most extreme ones spoke about violence and things like that,” he said. “But a water gun is not a gun. It’s a toy. It doesn’t hurt anyone.”
Campaigners in the city have adopted the water pistol as a symbol of local resistance. “To us, it is clear that it doesn’t harm anyone,” Pardo Rivacoba said. “But if we’re talking about violence, let’s talk about the violence of touristification. Let’s talk about the violence that tourism is inflicting on the city in terms of evictions, of pushing out the population, of labour exploitation, in the overload and abuse of public services.
“When it comes to tourism, there is violence taking place. But it’s not because of water guns.”
Additional reporting by Jon Henley
