Barcelona Residents Are Spraying Tourists with Water Guns
See how travelers are reacting to residents' protest against overtourism.
Barcelona is a beautiful city on Spain's Mediterranean coastline, filled with beaches, world-famous restaurants, art, architecture, clubs, culture, and stunning vistas. It is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Europe, maybe the world. And the city's residents are absolutely sick of the hordes of visitors.
A protest from city residents during the first weekend of July demonstrated just how over it they were. Thousands of people flooded the streets of Barcelona, calling for a reduction in the number of visitors coming to the city. One protestor told French news outlet AFP that the city's tourism has made it "unlivable."
Not only did tourists in the city get met with signs that read "Tourists Go Home," they were also sprayed with water guns, according to CBS. But the reasons for the protests are very understandable. Spanish newspaper El País reported that housing costs in Barcelona reached record highs in February 2024.
"We have the highest rental prices we have ever had," Enric Aragonès, the spokesman for the Catalan Tenants' Union, told El País. "This translates not only into people spending over half of their salary to pay rent, but also more and more families being forced to live in substandard conditions because they can't access decent housing."
These high housing prices and shortages can be partially credited to the city's nonstop tourism. "The last years, the city has turned completely for tourists, and what we want is a city for citizens and not in service of tourists," one protestor told Reuters.
Comparing the number of people who stayed in hotels in Barcelona in 1990 versus 2023 shows how the influx of tourists impacts the city. In 1990, the number of tourists staying overnight in hotels was 1.7 million, and in 2023, it was 7.8 million, according to Statista. However, visitors aren't just staying in hotels in 2023, which seems to be a big part of the problem for city residents.
Statista reported that Barcelona had over 12.3 million overnight tourists—and while 7.8 million of those tourists stayed in hotels, the remainder stayed in properties like Airbnb and other types of vacation rentals. While Barcelona's mayor, Jaume Collboni, recently announced that there would be policy changes addressing how housing can be rented to tourism coming in 2028, many signs from the anti-tourist protest called out Collboni.
Other protests have broken out across Spain because of overtourism. There were protests in Málaga and Palma de Mallorca, each drawing crowds of thousands. Spain is far from the only popular destination that is dealing with overtourism or pushback from locals, though Barcelona's residents may be the first city to deploy water guns to drive home their message.
In 2023, Dubrovnik had some of the worst overtourism in the world, threatening to overtake the beautiful monuments and coastline that attracted so many to the locale in the first place. We've also seen it in the popular Greek island Santorini, and measures have been put in place to combat overcrowding and tourism in Greece, Italy, and other cities all over the world. For some destinations, a tourist tax has been implemented, while others threaten fines for breaking rules and laws.
Solving the crisis of overtourism won't happen overnight, but we at Thrillist always believe that you should be as minimally invasive on your travels as possible. For now, we suggest that you try one of these less busy destinations to avoid the crowds and the water guns.
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