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).
It seems more effective to get short term rentals banned in their city by organizing and speaking to their local city council.
Squirting unsuspecting visitors with water guns seems ineffective and unlikely to achieve any results.
It got them enough attention to make it to the CNN…
You make a point, but I still question if a CNN article will achieve the desired results. People ought to discuss with their local representatives to achieve things.
Their local representative probably doesn’t give a shit, but now that it’s making international news and making them look bad they might act.
Now that I know about this in Colorado, surely it will get better
The town hall intends to ban short term rentals in a few years. Definitely far too slow, but it has gotten to the point that even politicians who want to see their city’s coffers grow fat admit that it’s an economic activity that does more harm than good.
Yup.
Like many cities around the world, AirBNB (and similar) redirecting housing into short term rentals has had a massive negative impact on long term housing for local residents.
Well, that and the constant crackdown governments do on new construction. AirBNB takes housing out of the supply and over-strict zoning prevents new housing from coming in.
You mean the zoning laws, that demand houses to be built for people living in them instead of tourist short term rentals? Yeah bad bad zoning laws.
There many things wrong with many zoning laws. Of course it’s dependent municipality, but in many places light residential is given preference, neighbourhoods are designed for driving. Wide roads designed to have higher speed limits so aren’t all that walkable. Zoning is done separately for residential, commercial, and industrial. So there’s no shops close by to walk to, so gotta use a car.
It all adds up to neighbourhoods that aren’t all that livable. But older parts of a cities that were built before all this zoning are walkable, there’s a good mix of housing and shops. Those places are were people want to live. But also where tourists want to stay.
Bad zoning laws indeed.
ABnB is the worst. Once it moved away from “renting a room in an occupied house” to “become a landlord with less steps and no oversight!” it became a blight.
I love it. If they protest peacefully like this, it’s innefective. If they are violent, or destructive it’s innefective. Do you really think if talking with politicians worked we would be in this situation? They are trying to get more attention to the problem and this worked perfectly.
I’m noticing this tactic a lot of people shitting on activism by handwringing about “Oh I’m totally one of you and I totally agree with your goals but your tactics are just going too far!”
MLK decried this exact thing in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:
Attacking tourists is not exactly a solution and will just fuck their economy up even more.
It’s totally harmless and works to grab the media attention.