Overtourism
in Europe's historic cities sparks backlash
Angry
protests from residents in popular areas force city hall officials to take
action
Jon Henley
Jon Henley
and Guardian correspondents
@jonhenley
Sat 25 Jan
2020 05.00 GMT
Across
Europe, historic cities are buckling. Mass tourism, encouraged by cash-hungry
councils after the 2008 crash and fuelled by the explosion of cheap flights and
online room rentals, has become a monster. The backlash, however, has begun.
In the past
decade, the number of low-cost airline seats available each year in Europe has
risen by more than 10% annually, more than doubling to more than 500m.
Meanwhile
Airbnb, the biggest but far from only holiday lettings platform, has reported
triple-digit growth in several European cities over the past five years,
driving 10 of them to ask the EU for help. The cities have between 10,000 and
60,000 listings each.
The net
result is that over the course of a year, popular short-break destinations such
as Amsterdam and Barcelona host upwards of 18,000 visitors for each inhabitant,
prompting angry protests from locals and forcing city halls to take action.
It is not
always evident, however, what that action should be – or if it will work. The
trade-off between the revenues and jobs generated through tourism and quality
of life is a tricky one. So the idea is not discouragement but management, say
city halls.
Amsterdam
Overtourism
in the historic centre of Amsterdam had gone beyond the already extreme
nuisance of drunken visitors vomiting nightly on 17th-century doorsteps and
urinating copiously in canals, according to city hall.
With more
than 19 million tourists in 2018 thronging a warren of narrow streets and
alleyways that are home to 850,000 people, it was getting dangerous. “At times
there was a real safety concern,” said Vera Al, of the finance and economic
affairs department.
The most
crowded parts of the city – the red light district and the main nightlife areas
of Rembrandtplein and Leidseplein – were becoming unliveable; in the old centre
shops selling wooden tulips, vacuum-packed cheese or cannabis seeds were
replacing chemists, greengrocers and hairdressers. Doctors could no longer find
surgery space.
More than
60,000 jobs in Amsterdam are directly linked to tourism and visitors to the
city spend more than €6bn (£5bn) annually.
But over
the past two years, the council has adopted tough measures. Tour coaches have
mostly been banished to the outskirts and new shops catering solely to tourists
have been outlawed by rewritten zoning regulations.
There will
be no new hotels once developers have exhausted existing licenses. Pending a
possible outright ban in some neighbourhoods, Airbnb-style lets must sleep no
more than four and cannot be let for more than 30 days a year.
A tourist
tax has been launched: €3 per person per night, on top of a 7% levy on each
hotel room (10% on accommodation booked person-to-person online). “Tourists
increase the cost of policing and cleaning the public space,” said Al, who
works with deputy mayor Victor Everhardt. “We say it’s only fair they should
contribute to them.”
Some of the
worst excesses, such as beer bikes – a pedal-powered mobile bar groups of
drinkers – have been outlawed in the city centre. Tours of the red light
district’s windows, running once every couple of minutes, are to be banned from
1 April, when all guided tours of the old centre will also require permits.
The new
mayor, Femke Halsema, has even tabled four possible options for the historic
sex workers’ district, known as De Wallen. These include relocating all or part
of it to other parts of the city, which would be a big call, politically, for
part of the fabric of old Amsterdam.
Somewhat
less controversially, city hall has run several successful tourist awareness
campaigns, including plastering large posters portraying residentson city
centre doors, each bearing the slogan “We live here.”
The
concerted drive involves the mayor and all eight deputies. “It crosses all
departments,” Al said. “None of it is rocket science, and we hope that taken
together these measures will add up.”
Nationally,
said Elsje van Vuuren of the Dutch tourist board NBTC, the strategy is about
dispersing visitors to lesser-known but equally attractive towns. The board has
stopped promoting the Netherlands as a destination and aims instead to better
manage the flow.
Amsterdam
has no illusions, however, that its programme will reduce the number of
tourists visiting the city – or even significantly slow a rate of growth due to
bring 40 million visitors a year to the Netherlands by 2030.
“The focus
is really about restoring liveability for all those who have been affected,”
said Al. “It’s about making residents feel at home again. They shouldn’t feel
like strangers in their own city. We believe a city is first for living in.
Only second for visiting.”
Barcelona
About 30 million people will visit Barcelona this year, a seemingly unstoppable tide, which has prompted exasperated residents to resort to ill-concealed irony.
“Don’t tell
anyone you have been on holiday to Barcelona,” reads one leaflet recently
handed out to tourists. “They will steal the city from us, and it will stop
being attractive to you and liveable for us.”
The city’s
response is improved management. Its Plan 2020 initiative aims to change “from
managing tourism in the city, to managing the tourist city” – although Xavier
Marcé, the councillor responsible, insists residents take priority.
“I’m not
interested in managing a tourist city,” he said. Dispersal is the answer, Marcé
believes: the problem is not so much that Barcelona has sold itself but that
it’s sold itself badly. Aware the sector brings in about €10bn a year, he said:
“We don’t want more tourists but that doesn’t mean we want fewer.”
As the
city’s well-known sites, such as the Sagrada Familia, la Rambla and Park Güell
are over-subscribed, the idea is to divert people to other areas and
activities. The city is in talks with booking.com and others to devise an
alternative visitor’s package.
Barcelona
has also declared a moratorium on new hotels in its most touristed areas,
pushing visitors to the periphery (although as Pere Mariné of the 120-member
Federation of Barcelona Residents’ Associations noted, where people sleep “doesn’t
make much difference. They all want to go to the Sagrada Familia.”)
Despite
trying hard, the city seems unable to control the rise of Airbnb and others.
According to a Victoria University study, Barcelona has the highest density of
tourist apartments in Europe: 12 for every 1,000 residents, compared with 10 in
Rome and seven in London.
For
residents, this has translated into a 50% rent increase over the past five
years. A 24-year-old earning an average wage now faces a monthly rent equal to
114% of their salary. As a result, about 80% of 16- to 30-year-olds still live
with their parents.
The battle
to reduce the number of available beds will not affect the millions of
daytrippers. As many as 20,000 a day disembark from cruise ships to head for the
sites but spend little ashore. More arrive by coach, clogging up and polluting
the city.
Marcé plans
to force coaches to park on Barcelona’s perimeter and their passengers to use
the already saturated public transport network; extra buses will be financed by
a new Barcelona tourist tax, he says.
While
residents are fed up with mass tourism, Mariné says there is no real popular
movement for change, partly because tourists mean jobs. A demo with the slogan
“Barcelona is not for sale” drew 2,000 people: “That’s not going to change
anything.”
Ultimately,
the city’s powers are limited and the Catalan regional government tends to
share the hospitality industry’s view that more is better. As tour operators
survey the growing Asian market, millions more are due to discover Barcelona’s
not-so-secret treasures. Stephen Burgen
Florence
Sick of the
sight of tourists picnicking on the steps of Renaissance monuments, the mayor
of Florence, Dario Nardella, announced in 2017 that he would douse the surfaces
with water to keep people at bay.
The
hosepipe ploy never became permanent, only being used a couple of times on the
steps of key monuments, such as the Basilica of Santa Croce, the burial place
of Michelangelo, and the Chiesa di Santo Spirito. But the message resonated.
“There does
seem to have been a rise in awareness and sensitivity among visitors,” said
Cecilia Del Re, Florence’s councillor for tourism and the environment. “We did
a lot of campaigning, telling people not to throw their rubbish on the street
and to respect the city, and this is showing some results.”
Hefty fines
for people caught scrawling their name on the Ponte Vecchio or peeing in the
street in the historic centre, a Unesco world heritage site, have also improved
decorum.
Attracting
14 million tourists a year, Florence is Italy’s most-visited city after Venice
and Rome. Boasting a huge and rich variety of the world’s heritage and
surrounded by Tuscany’s rolling hills, the city’s popularity is easy to
understand.
But as with
Venice and Rome, the growth in tourism has seen residents driven out of town by
the rising cost of living and arrival of Airbnb: according to a Siena
university study, one in five properties in the historic centre is advertised
as a short-term let.
Some
measures, however, seem to be paying off. “One of the main issues is that
everyone is so focused on the historic centre, which is only a 5km sq area in a
city of 105km sq,” said Del Re. “So we are heavily promoting areas outside of
the centre.
“We are
also close to launching an app that will direct people to other sites if, for
example, the Uffizi Gallery is too crowded.” The city is also working with
lesser known, but equally beautiful, towns in Tuscany, such as Arezzo, to
promote them.
City
leaders are against imposing daily limits on the numbers who can enter the
centre, but have increased tenfold the cost of taking tour buses that bring
people to the city for a couple of hours. They are also promoting “congress
tourism”, where people visit the city for a conference or business meeting and
stay for a few days.
Meanwhile,
Florence authorities have converted some public property into social housing to
motivate young people to move in. “We want to re-incentivise people to live in
the historic centre,” said Del Re. Angela Guiffrida
Prague
The crowds surging into Prague’s majestic Old Town Square to witness last year’s seasonal illumination of Christmas lights were so vast that ambulance crews and squads of police officers were needed in case things got out of hand.
The packed
scene and cosmopolitan nature of the gathered multitudes seemed to attest to a
marketing triumph that had assisted the Czech capital’s arrival as a first-rank
global tourist draw.
Yet the
vast number of foreign visitors crammed into the modestly sized square
crystallised what has become one of Prague authorities’ biggest headaches,
prompting a major rethink of its tourism strategy that may eventually include a
crackdown on short-term lettings.
The sheer
numbers drawn by the beautiful but relatively small medieval old town –
encompassing Prague castle, the 600-year-old Charles bridge and a maze of
ancient cobbled streets – has put a strain on resources and quality of life
that many long-established residents find intolerable.
A rising
exodus of native residents and the growth of often tacky tourist shops at the
expense of those catering for locals finally forced the authorities to act.
The first
step is a major publicity campaign to encourage visitors to explore greater
Prague, a city of 1.4 million residents, beyond the limited quarter on either
bank of the River Vltava, where the majority of its most storied buildings, as
well as touristy restaurants and pubs, are located.
“Too many
people are coming just for a very small number of purposes, of buildings,” said
Pavel Čižinský, the former mayor of the Prague 1 municipality, which includes
the historic old town district. “To disperse the tourists more, I think it is
necessary to involve more those who are running the tourist industry.
“The guides
must say to their groups, do you want to go through these crowds where
everything is twice as expensive, or do you want to go and see something which
is maybe half a kilometre from Charles bridge, but which is also nice.”
The local
tourist authority has published brochures called Prague Walks promoting the
attractions of other neighbourhoods of historic interest, including Vinohrady,
Karlín, Holešovice and Žižkov. For the strategy to work, however, strategists
need to succeed in a far trickier goal: persuading visitors to come back for
another look.
“We are
trying to inspire repeated visits to Prague, and to motivate visitors to stay
longer,” said Barbora Hrubá, spokesperson for Prague city tourism authority.
“So far 70% of visitors to Prague are here for the first time. It’s
understandable that the likelihood that they will leave the city centre is
limited.”
Compounding
the rising volume of visitors has been the growth of alcohol-fuelled tourism
spurred by the Czech Republic’s deserved reputation as home to some of the
world’s best, and cheapest, beer.
Lucrative
organised pub crawls and stag nights have become the bane of many locals’
lives, with high noise levels and rowdy behaviour commonplace in a city centre
residential area that is home to about 25,000 Praguers. Robert Tait
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