‘Overtourism’ Is Driving Europeans Crazy
Is anti-tourist sentiment code for classism, racism, and
xenophobia, or a legitimate concern over a city's capacity to accommodate
visitors?
By Jessica Loudis SEPTEMBER 12, 2018
Lisbon tourists
Tourists make their way through one of Lisbon's narrow
medieval streets, 2016. (AP Photo / Armando Franca)
Among the papers found in Portuguese writer Fernando
Pessoa’s possession after his death in 1935 was an English-language book he
finished but never bothered to publish. Lisbon: What the Tourist Should See was
written as part of an imagined public-relations campaign for his beloved city,
which Pessoa felt was neglected in favor of places like London and Paris. The
book, finally released in 1992, highlights the greatest hits of the Portuguese
capital: the 16th-century monastery that is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site,
the nearby town famous for its eclectic castles and mansions, and the winding
fisherman’s quarter where locals go to hear fado singers perform.
These sites still exist, though in a universe distinct from
Pessoa’s. In a sense, he got his wish: Lisbon has become one of the most
popular tourist destinations in Europe, and is, as a result, in on the cusp of
a massive physical transformation. Restaurants, luxury hotels, and “concept”
boutiques are springing up all over the city. Cranes mar the views from
hillside miradouros and rooftop bars. During peak season, tuk-tuks and
double-decker sightseeing buses prowl the city for customers. Cruise ships loom
in the harbor. English is the lingua franca.
This is in large part to accommodate the record 12.7 million
people who visited the city last year, and the even larger numbers of those
projected to come. If trends persist, locals worry that the city will turn into
Paris—only without Eurodisney in the suburbs.
In recent years, “overtourism” has become a travel-industry
buzzword, a phenomenon created by the perfect storm of budget airlines,
short-term rental websites, and social media. (“You know, the Instagram
island,” an Australian backpacker said to me recently when describing the Greek
island of Santorini.) The problem is especially acute in Europe, which opened
the floodgates to short-term travel in 1997 by liberalizing its transportation
market. Suddenly, dozens of new, low-cost regional airlines began advertising
pocket change prices, and average trip length plummeted. Formerly sleepy cities
became crash pads for weekenders, cobblestone streets echoed with the sounds of
clicking heels and rolling suitcases, and urban infrastructures strained under
the pressure.
While Lisbon is not as fully saturated as, say, Barcelona,
the threat is on the horizon. It’s no longer a novelty to see bachelorette
parties in identical raunchy T-shirts careening down the avenues, or four-euro
mojitos hawked on sidewalks. The foreigners are coming; the question is whether
the Portuguese capital can effectively manage them.
There are no precise standards for gauging overtourism. One
thinks of Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography—you know it
when you see it. And you see it when Europeans and Americans flood downtown
areas, and intoxicated visitors relieve themselves in public. Tourists in
Europe are hard to avoid. Their presence wouldn’t be so vexing if they weren’t
also good for local economies: Nearly 17 percent of Portugal’s GDP came from
tourism in 2017, and that number is expected to rise by more than 5 percent
this year. In Spain, tourism made up 15 percent of the GDP, expected to
increase 3 percent; and in Greece, these figures are 20 and 5 percent,
respectively. Still, local government regulation has not caught up to the
market, and in hot spots like Barcelona, some officials claim that it costs the
city more to manage visitors than it earns from their trips.
Barcelona has emerged as a case study in handling
overtourism, which it has dealt with since hosting the Olympics in 1992. The
city gets 32 million visitors every year to its 1.6 million residents. The
number of beds available to book has quadrupled since 1990, and rents have
followed suit, with real-estate prices in Barcelona now 50 percent higher than
in the rest of the country. Lucila Mallart, a historian who lived in the
middle-class Barcelona neighborhood of Eixample before moving to Girona, a
smaller Catalan city about an hour away, says, “There is a general feeling of
‘normal’ people fleeing the city. Most of our friends who still live there are
the ones who bought a flat 10 years ago, the rest have left because now they
cannot afford to rent or buy. Many have moved to neighboring towns, which were
traditionally working class.”
Eixample is far from gentrified in comparison to areas like
El Born or the Barri Gotic, which long ago replaced corner stores and workers’
bars with champagne caves and luxury outlets, but nevertheless, residents feel
the strain. Back in 2006, locals would know when it was time for dinner when
drunken British and Northern European tourists began stumbling from bars. Since
then, the problem has intensified. Las Ramblas, the central thoroughfare that
was once the pride of the city, is so clogged with street performers,
pickpockets, and tourists that Catalans go out of their way to avoid it.
Other locals have taken a more confrontational approach:
Anti-tourist graffiti punctuates popular neighborhoods, and earlier this
summer, members of a youth group associated with the Catalan independence party
attacked a tourist bus with smoke bombs and banners. The incident was picked up
by the Spanish-language press as an instance of turismofobia, yet it
illustrates the sensitive dynamics that underlie the issue. What looks like
anti-tourist agitation to one person may come across as classism, racism, or
xenophobia to another—particularly if that person doesn’t fit the stereotype of
a “guiri”: a pale, Anglo tourist with an affinity for booze and money to burn.
Public feelings about tourism have long been mixed. Back in
the 1930s, says Harold Goodwin, director of the Institute of Place Management
at Manchester Metropolitan University, there was documentation of hard-partying
tourists destroying Greek fishing villages. “It’s always been true that people
go abroad to behave badly,” he observed. In the 1970s, tourism sociologists
developed the “Irritation Index” to gauge residents’ feelings about unwanted
visitors, and in 1975 Swiss scholar Jost Krippendorf published The Landscape
Eaters, a now-canonical text about the ecological consequences of excessive
tourism in the Alps. At the same time, people recognize that wanting to manage
the problem isn’t the same as wanting to drive away visitors. A 2017 poll
conducted by the local government found that although 60 percent of people
believed that Barcelona had exceeded its ability to host tourists, more than 83
percent thought that tourism was, on balance, a good thing for the city.
In response to public grumbling, now amplified on social
media, policy-makers across the continent have adopted a range of measures to
preserve quality of life: banning cruise ships (Venice), coating walls in
pee-resistant paint (Hamburg), cracking down on Airbnb (Berlin), and outlawing
selfie sticks (Milan). In Andalucía, where local governments are weighing a ban
on bachelor and bachelorette parties, some say the roving gangs of screaming
foreigners are no worse than street festivals or soccer celebrations, while
others recall more traumatic encounters.
“After seeing a husband-to-be in Granada riding a donkey
while handcuffed to a dwarf dressed as a gypsy…I thought I had seen
everything,” wrote a tour guide from the northeastern Spanish city of Zaragoza
on Facebook. That was, “until the moment when people on both sides of the
street began to sing.”
Efforts to minimize mass tourism often focus on carrying
capacity, or the notion that having more than a certain number of people in a
confined space will be culturally and environmentally disruptive. Andreas
Papatheodorou, a sociologist at the University of the Aegean who studies the
implications of transportation on tourism, notes that some policy-makers are
pushing a “quality over quantity” approach—targeting visitors who can afford to
stay longer and spend more.
One way of doing this is by levying a general tourism tax on
individuals; another is through accommodation taxes on lower-quality hotels and
hostels. Visitors in Rome pay between three and seven euros a night simply to
stay in the city, while Croatia’s “sojourn tax” imposes higher fees on tourists
who visit during peak season, similar to congestion pricing on cars, in order
to spread out tourism over the year.
The problem, of course, is that such measures have a
disproportionate effect on lower-income travelers, which illustrates another
uncomfortable reality: People rarely get angry about extremely wealthy
travelers, who are generally insulated from the day-to-day life of a city.
Moreover, this plays out on a geopolitical scale, as less-affluent countries
are more affected by travel taxes than wealthier ones. According to a 2017
report commissioned by the EU, the measures have the sharpest impact on coastal
destinations in Southern Europe, where steep competition means that even an
incremental price increase of three or four euros can deter potential visitors.
Furthermore, not everybody agrees that the problem is space.
“Many academics are going on and on about the carrying capacity of a place,”
says Goodwin, who criticizes this emphasis as misplaced. “You can accommodate
very large numbers of tourists with no impact at all if you manage them
carefully,” he says.
Disneyland “does that very well,” Goodwin says, explaining
that the theme park exemplifies sustainable tourism—any system in which a
visitor’s admission covers the full cost of taking care of them in that
destination, from dealing with litter to sewage to food. Still, the fact remains
that it’s much easier to build a tourist trap like Disneyland from scratch than
it is to transform a living, breathing city into a place that tourists can
sustainably visit.
Barcelona’s strategy has been several years in the making.
In 2015, after getting elected on a platform of reducing mass tourism,
socialist Mayor Ada Colau declared a yearlong moratorium on new hotel
construction and began fining and shutting down illegal Airbnb rentals. Since
then, her administration has focused on better integrating tourism into city
infrastructures. Under the Special Tourist Accommodation Plan, Barcelona grants
new licenses to tourist accommodations—from hotels to Airbnb listings—based on
neighborhood congestion, with an eye towards more evenly distributing visitors
throughout the city. The plan, which has been heavily criticized by the hotel
industry, is set to go into effect in 2019.
Harold Goodwin, who has worked on sustainable-tourism
initiatives in Barcelona, believes that the city has done more than anywhere else
in the world to test out different methods of responding to mass tourism, and
has adopted what he calls “a remarkably progressive” approach to the issue.
“They’ve refused to scapegoat the tourist,” he says. “They take the view that
the problem is managing large numbers of people in an urban space whether
they’re business tourists, leisure tourists, or students.”
Part of the insight in Colau’s strategy is in
differentiating between problems of housing and tourism. Since 2015, Barcelona
has responded to real-estate pressures from what Goodwin calls a “whole
government perspective.” After separating tourism promotion from tourism
management, the municipal authority created a cross-departmental working group
to deal with tourism as a whole, meaning that the inspectors responsible for
taxing short-term rentals are not the same people who respond to late-night
calls from neighbors about Airbnb orgies. In making these distinctions, the aim
is to adjust regulation accordingly, so (remaining) locals won’t be priced out
of their homes by visitors able to pay significantly more.
Additionally, the
city is dedicating more resources to the study and management of tourism. None
of these methods are new, but the lesson of Barcelona, Goodwin says, is that
there’s no one single solution to overtourism. In other parts of the world,
“de-marketing” and even removing alluring place names from visitor maps have
proven effective in changing behavior. (Goodwin confessed that he once did this
while working on a park project in the Philippines. It worked splendidly.)
Barcelona’s proactive approach is an exception. In most
cities overwhelmed by tourists, it’s far more common for officials to deny that
there’s a problem at all. Tourism ministers and travel industry professionals
have historically been judged by the number of international arrivals—rather
than, say, length of stay or contribution to the local economy—so the incentive
has been simply to get people into the country, with little regard to how long
they stick around or what they actually do. In an age of so-called “city
breaks” and weekend trips, this no longer makes sense—even if twice as many
people were to visit Munich or Bordeaux, they wouldn’t be adding any additional
value (financial or otherwise) if they stayed half as long.
What’s more, oversaturated cities don’t appeal to people who
would rather not spend their vacations dodging tour groups at museums and
fighting for tables at overpriced restaurants. This suggests that class divides
will be further exacerbated in places that ignore overtourism. As the very rich
find new, secluded places to go, the majority of visitors will keep piling into
the same popular cities, alongside entirely new demographics of tourists. And
as the middle class booms in countries like China, millions of people will
suddenly have the opportunity to travel abroad.
The term “overtourism” was coined in a research paper about
overfishing in Indonesia more than a decade ago, and in many ways, those
concerns about sustainability remain the same. What’s the best way for a city
to cultivate tourism without wrecking life for residents, ruining subways and
beaches, and pricing out people who have lived there for generations? Can city
planners and economists anticipate when a destination is about to become
unlivable, and do something about it in advance?
In the case of Lisbon, what’s happening now has been in the
works for a while. After the 2011 debt crisis, the Portuguese government
courted low-cost airlines, undertook a massive overseas digital-marketing
strategy, and poured money into growing tourism. Seven years later, tourism is
now the country’s largest employment sector, and the socialist government
recently launched a program to lease 33 historical sites around the country
into order to nudge visitors away from the hot spots of Lisbon and Porto. As
was the case with Spain, public reactions to this have been mixed.
But Portugal, at least, has the benefit of being able to
learn from the missteps of others. The next few years will reveal whether it
decides to do so.
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