Protesters in Barcelona have sprayed visitors with water as part of a demonstration against mass tourism.
Demonstrators marching through areas popular with tourists on Saturday chanted “tourists go home” and squirted them with water pistols, while others carried signs with slogans including “Barcelona is not for sale.”
Thousands of protesters took to the streets of the city in the latest demonstration against mass tourism in Spain, which has seen similar actions in the Canary Islands and Mallorca recently, decrying the impact on living costs and quality of life for local people.
The demonstration was organised by a group of more than 100 local organizations, led by the Assemblea de Barris pel Decreixement Turístic (Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth).
Screw these guys. Whatever your position on the matter it’s not the tourists themselves who are culpable, but the national and local government for allowing their economy to be so reliant on tourism.
It doesn’t justify assaulting and harassing people in the streets.
Barcelona is not the only city in the world that attracts a large number of tourists. Many cities attract more. Yet Barcelona is the only place I see with so many of these xenophobic nutjobs.
If the government is sitting on its hands then you can’t blame them for doing something themselves. So I would blame the government for the protests and not the protesters. It’s their home, not a theme park.
Yes but you could raise awareness in different ways or complain in a different place.
Those tourists are already there. They aren’t gonna pack up and leave. Sure they are probably not going to recommend Barcelona to their friends in the future but that’s insignificant.
Those tourists can’t even vote in legislation that would fix it, because they don’t live there. So it’s literally barking at the wrong tree.
And for the record, I’m very much aware that protests are almost by definition annoying. I’m very much for all the climate protests even when they block roads and such.
This justifies assaulting people how, exactly?
It was a peaceful protest from what I can see in the video and in the article text. By assault, are you talking about the tiny cheap water pistols the two girls were squirting?
Yes. Downplay it all you want but it’s still assault. Especially when acid attacks are not unheard of.
Words aren’t black and white things. The cashier not issuing a receipt is financial fraud but we’re talking about gum; they dodged 5 cents in taxes.
I personally haven’t heard of those one single time, but even if they were a thing every now and then, are we going to assume that anyone spraying a few ml of water might be throwing acid just bcuz? The point of these protests is to raise attention to the problem, not to harm tourists. If someone goes that “extra mile”, throw them behind bars, this instead of assuming that the thousand others might be trying to seriously injuring someone when they’re, very likely, doing something that goes away after 2 minutes in the local weather.
It is not a secret that a few cities across southern Europe very pissy about the treatment they’re getting. I’m not into victim blaming, but it is strange to think of these tourists as surprised when they got confronted with some sort of protests or message of disdain. In Portugal those are all over the place. From graffiti to protests. And sure, most of those do not involve any sort of physical touch with the tourists, however, if I was a tourist I’d be way madder at some of the protests I see over here than over taking a minuscule spray of water and those you wouldn’t qualify as “assault” only as “speech”.
You are defending assaulting strangers who have done nothing.
The internet is wild.
Keep muttering that word. Whatever.
Their Rickshaws and boats are fucking the air as well. Can I also say I’m being assaulted? I’m objectively being harmed.
Plenty of people over here are considering way less nice things that spraying water. You have some actual assault going on in places (as in, punching tourists in the face) and vandalism to drive them off, but yeah, let’s pretend that the 5ml of water are the real harm.
Knowingly going to a country suffering from overtourism? Going for AirBnbs instead of hotels? Blocking locals from being able to go to work because whatever route they pick looks scenic? Not bothering to learn like three words or whatever to be able to say hello or goodbye?
That’s a “I’m going to throw 500kg of glass in the general bin” kind of done nothing. They know they’re being asses to the locals. Is it legal? Yes. It is also legal not to recycle.
They’re dehumanizing us because “they paid” but 30 seconds of slight moisture is the real crime.
The 200€ of flights (which has plenty of negative externalities), 100€ for the AirBnb (which not only was someone’s eviction but also likely dodged taxes), 100€ for random food (which likely dodged taxes) and 100€ in some random tourist trap (which many times dodge taxes). Those crimes do not count because they were intermediated by someone else? The thousands who get trespassing tourists? The littered nature? No, those do not count; what really counts is the bloody water.
The bulk of the tourism money doesn’t come from the 90% of clueless asses filling the streets. Comes from the rich ones. But if the law was such that it only allowed the rich to come it would also be bad. So, like I asked you before, what’s the actual solution? Just pretending that nothing is happening?
And FYI, every single one of these countries has not-that-far-places that are more than pleased to see tourist activity. You have like ecovillages & such where you get to participate, appreciate nature and do rural tourism, all while enjoying the Mediterranean weather they came for. But no, people really must take the 1000000000th picture of the Sagrada Familia so that their travel-ego fills up. And yet you think that we should have empathy over that? Housing and jobs disappearing because random twats want to take pictures. Oh noes, the moisture. Right…
I’m not muttering it. It’s literally assault.
“Knowingly going to a country suffering from over tourism” oh, please. None of those consequences you listed are any individual tourist’s fault. If the government has failed to regulate these things that’s on them.
In any case, do the protestors know all of the people they assaulted individually? I somehow doubt it.
Dress it up however you want, you are advocating for indiscriminate xenophobic assault and harassment.
It’s a protest. Same thing as climate protestors blocking the roads, no the individual commuters are not responsible for climate change, but the blocking roads is an effective way to draw attention to the issue.
Protests need to be disruptive or they won’t be effective. These tourists had their day/lunch ruined at worst, the protestors are fighting for affordable living in the city they live in and they clearly have found an effective way to protest.
So yeah no, I feel bad for the tourists but that’s about it.
Climate protesters don’t assault people who are just sitting down eating. It’s not the same.
(I actually would criticise those climate groups for separate reasons but that’s a different conversation).
Those tourists can’t even vote. With climate protests at least you are raising awareness in people that can have some change or make some pressure.
Yes protests need to be disruptive but spraying people in London would be just as effective as spraying tourists that are ALREADY in their city.
These specific tourists were not targetted to change their minds. It was done to spread awareness and get coverage in the international media that Barcelona has nad enough of tourists.
It worked. So it 's a successful protest.
I guess you are right that it created news but I doubt it will have the desired effect. One does not guarantee the other necessarily
If we only did things that have guaranteed outcomes, not much would get done.
Then you’re not paying attention. Plenty of such protests-with-thousands in a few major places that were overwhelmed. Barcelona, Maiorca, Lisbon, Algarve, probably most of Greece, Italy, Southern France, etc…
It is not false that the government has blame, however, there’s plenty of preverse incentive in here. Land prices skyrocketed and a lot of very well positioned individuals got very well in life.
At the end of the day, being a decent human being doesn’t require laws. If you know you’re competing with locals whose rents already are higher than their salaries, with their businesses that now can’t support rents any longer and generally browsing fake-local-crap (and I assure you that most mass tourism is), then you’re just making yourself unwelcome.
Even the “tourists are injecting money in the local economy” argument is in a good part bullshit. Ofc that some of it loops to everyone else, but the gains are generally very poorly distributed and many times negative as that money destroys homes and jobs.
If you go to some parts of Lisbon, you’re not going to be able to hear one single word of Portuguese. Just yday I heard about a guy complaining that tourists attempted to forbid him from going into a waterfall near his home because… It ruins their photos and they waited in line to have them while the guy just “skipped the queue”. Mass-tourists can’t just figure that it is a country where people live and not a theme park, the “we paid to come here, we have rights” argument is heard plenty of times.
Sorry, how does any of this justify assaulting tourists?
I’m from London and now live in another tourist heavy city. It doesn’t justify assaulting people.
It doesn’t justify assaulting (albeit calling 3ml of water in the Mediterranean summer an assault is a bit of a stretch), but that was not the only thing you said. You were isolating Barcelona as a special case. I simply said that it is not isolated at all, that every popular region along the entire Mediterranean coast is suffering from the same.
London’s situation is bad but 1) 6 times more population dilutes tourism way better 2) London’s tourism is “going there, taking pictures, famous Harry Potter things, giant ferry wheel, bye” instead of “I like this weather and everything is cheap; I think I’ll stay here for as long as my visa allows” 3) the richer you are the least affected you get as tourists can’t compete with you all that easily 4) London has that other phenomena, which is not quite tourism, called mass immigration, and the last time I’ve heard about citizen actions towards the problem they were following the “we no longer want to participate in anything with out neighbors” path which is IMHO a bit more extreme than just being mad en masse with a relatively harmless protest.
From a political standpoint, Madrid is an oppressive mess. Catalonia is in the podium for the most productive region and this is killing it slowly (as it did with Portugal and parts of other countries). You can’t quite say the same about London. In London you might end up living far from the city center but your economic woes do not come from the thousands of immigrants nor the tourists all around.
Barcelona DOES have a unique reputation for these anti-tourist groups. That’s why I said Barcelona was unique. But it’s NOT unique in hosting large numbers of tourists. Not even close.
The literal exact same thing happens in every other alike place. We have the same in Lisbon.
The pieces of information foreigners get do not necessarily match the local truths.
As an example: I do volunteering at a kind-of-food-bank. It is obviously free to do. However, if you try to look that up in the internet, every single result will lead you to the idea that you need to have a guide or whatever reason to pay in order to do volunteering in here. The English information is HIGHLY distorted to hit foreigners. It is 100% unreliable. Do not attempt to look up for things about southern European countries in English. Most things that can somehow be capitalized on are lies or deceptive.
Okay. Well I’ve been to plenty of capital and major cities in London and Barcelona is the only place I’ve ever seen anti tourist stuff around and heard about this in the media. Granted, I’ve not been to Lisbon.
Random tweet I just came across: https://x.com/Scaife51/status/1811403266531471842?t=4fdIaowFfaHmYv77no51LQ
That’s this place: https://www.reddit.com/r/portugal/comments/1e1c4ky/why_albufeira_is_a_british_colony/
Can you realistically believe that one can live in there without being anti-tourist? That’s NOT a one off. That’s a very common occurrence in the south coast (both Portugal and Spain). It is not a major city or anything like that. Every city down there is currently like that.
I think it’s fair to say that football hooliganism is not unique to any particular place, and is a specific and unique problem. I do find football hooligans a nightmare. Is that the same problem as we’re discussing with general tourism? I would argue no. Football hooligans are horrible in their own countries too.
That’s an absolutely perfect example of what I’m saying. Whose fault is that - the individual who goes to that place, or the local government for approving those businesses to set themselves up on that street? If I lived there I would be furious. Not with the tourist spending money there, but with government for enabling the situation.
I’ve travelled around Spain and Italy (not Portugal, though I would love to visit one day) and I completely agree that it’s a shame when places are taken over by businesses that cater to tourists to the detriment of the authentic local culture. The first place that comes to mind for me is Amalfi in Italy, where this was by far the worst part about my visit there, despite it being an absolutely gorgeous part of the world.
Where we disagree is where the responsibility lies. I do not believe it’s the fault of the individual tourist. Local and national governments absolutely have the ability to change the situation. Obviously they don’t because tourism brings in so much money. I don’t particularly see how accosting and blaming individuals who have come to visit achieves anything or places blame on the people whose literal job it is to regulate these things.
Nothing worse than hearing that self-entitled argument along with “you’re not complaining when we use all our money here are ye???” Makes my blood boil.
Aren’t you figuring that we’d rather not have that? That money is mostly not reaching anyone but landlords, restaurant owners and rickshaws. We get poorer with tourism money.
The jobs that pay us more than 860€ (the minimum salary) disappear with mass tourism because 1) land values get too expensive 2) a lot of highly qualified people just emigrated away after being unable to pay rent.
People who attended STEM fields know that the way to get proper jobs is to leave the country, which is bloody unfair because we used to have them. Instead of 3k/mo white-collar jobs we get 860€/mo whipping simulators dealing with entitled tourists.
Ofc that not every job disappeared but since the economy is highly uncompetitive with it’s tourism focus, you get the worst possible scenario for everything else.
I’m going to guess you’re using an empiric “you”, because I was trying to agree with you! Everything you said is on point.
Then you’ve never interacted with the locals in these other places. Having grown up in a vacation town, I can tell you right now that the only difference here is that the people with water guns have hit their breaking points.
Have you ever seen the movie Jaws? There’s a small throwaway bit in there where the wife of the chief of police is asking a friend of hers when she gets to be an islander (because the family had recently moved to the island from New York), and her friend responds, “Never. If you weren’t born here, then you’re not an islander.” Having grown up near where that movie was made, that’s 100% accurate to the local sentiment. On that island, they call people who move there “wash ashores” because they feel that they washed up like the flotsam and jetsam on the beach. In my town, we called the rich people who would come up to vacation in their lavish summer homes “snowbirds” because they migrated at the same time as the birds and couldn’t handle the winter weather.
The most consistent thing I’ve found about tourist areas is the negative impact the industry has on the area for locals and the hatred locals feel towards the tourists.
Whether these people are acting rightly or wrongly, they’re trying to hit the government and businesses where it hurts most - their profits - because it’s the only way they’ll ever care about the local problems.
Honestly - I’m quite a well travelled person and Barcelona is absolutely notorious for these groups. They are famous for it. So I stand by what I said. I’m from London and now live in a tourist heavy seaside town. I get it. But it doesn’t justify assaulting people.