Besieged by tourists, Barcelona rolls up the welcome mat

Besieged by tourists, Barcelona rolls up the welcome mat

The tourist model is in danger because there is no model. It’s not governed

- Ada Colau, new mayor of Barcelona

Ian Mount in Barcelona /August 7, 2015 / Financial Times / http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/129dae26-3690-11e5-bdbb-35e55cbae175.html#axzz3i9lpgs2G

After seven years of economic stagnation and high unemployment, most southern European cities are desperate to reel in as many free-spending tourists as they can. Not Barcelona.

After seeing the number of overnight visitors to their city increase more than 150 per cent in the past 15 years — making it Europe’s fourth most popular international tourist destination after London, Paris, and Rome — Barcelona residents have begun to wonder if tourists are more a blight than a blessing.

“It’s totally flooded. Family tourism doesn’t annoy, but nightlife tourism, drinking tourism make it impossible for residents to live,” says Llum Ventura Gil, a local resident who moved out of her seafront neighbourhood because of the increase in party tourism.

Those worries burst into the open in the city’s May elections, when local voters gave the largest block of seats to Barcelona en Comú, a leftist coalition that includes the populist Podemos party. One of the coalition’s promises was to lessen tourism’s impact on residents.

Ada Colau, the city’s new leftwing mayor, has obliged by rolling up the welcome mat. In one of her first moves in office, Ms Colau introduced a one-year moratorium on new hotel licences.

“Tourism is one of the principal economic activities of the city and it generates thousands of jobs. But right now the tourist model is in danger because there is no model. It’s not governed,” says Ms Colau, who rose to prominence during the economic crisis as a grass-roots, anti-eviction activist.

While Ms Colau’s approach has proven popular with residents in neighbourhoods inundated by tourism, it has angered the city’s powerful hotel industry. The moratorium paralysed 24 projects awaiting hotel licences and has endangered many others in earlier phases.

“There will be a boomerang effect and investors will not come,” Jordi Clos, the president of the city’s hotel union, warned when the moratorium was announced last month.

In recent months, funds interested in converting office buildings into luxury hotels have made many large investments in Barcelona real estate, such as last year’s €90m purchase of the Deutsche Bank building by KKH Capital Group and Perella Weinberg.

“If you want to make a new investment in Barcelona, you’re not going to do it because there’s no legal security,” says Jordi Badia Llorens, the chairman and chief executive of the local private equity fund Emin Capital, which has been fighting with Ms Colau’s administration over its plans to turn the city’s iconic Torre Agbar, which it bought for €150m in 2014, into a 410-room Grand Hyatt hotel. “If Barcelona is a problem but Paris isn’t, well, I’ll go to Paris.”

The fight boils down to a battle over the city’s identity. Since the 1992 Olympic Games inspired the city to rehabilitate its forgotten beachfront, build cruise ship docks and expand its airport, Barcelona has experienced a massive tourism boom. It has also become a popular destination for business travellers attending a growing number of conferences.

According to Barcelona Turisme, a public-private entity that promotes the city, the annual number of overnight visitors has grown from 1.7m in 1990 to 7.9m in 2014, and the number of hotel beds has increased threefold, from 18,569 to 68,036, over the same period. Today, tourism accounts for 14 per cent of the local economy and directly provides 114,087 jobs.

Tourists in BarcelonaBarcelona tourism

But in recent years tensions have grown between local residents and holidaymakers. Boosted by Ryanair’s entrance into Barcelona’s El Prat airport in 2010, the city experienced a surge of young visitors on boozy weekends and bachelor party tours. Residents began to complain that neighbourhoods around the Ciutat Vella (Old City) were becoming overrun with drunken visitors as businesses catering to locals closed to make way for trinket shops and theme restaurants.

The issue came to a head last August, when newspapers around the world ran photos of a group of Italian tourists cavorting naked through the seafront Barceloneta neighbourhood in the middle of the day. Locals took to the streets to protest over the next few nights, carrying signs that read: “This neighbourhood is not for sale.”

During the moratorium, Ms Colau says her administration will embark on a planning process to take a census of tourism’s impact and determine in which neighbourhoods it can grow and how to better distribute it to conserve the city’s identity.

She talks about reining in the city’s tourist apartments, of which 9,600 are licensed and up to 20,000 are illegal.

Ms Colau also wants to persuade the regional government to give Barcelona 100 per cent of the hotel tax charged in the city (it keeps about half) to invest in neighbourhoods most affected by tourism.

“What we are doing is a serious and responsible policy to make tourism sustainable. What we are doing is guaranteeing the investments in the long term,” Ms Colau says.

Still, some visitors cannot help but be surprised by Barcelona’s tourism ambivalence. On a recent trip to the city, Peruvian President Ollanta Humala offered to help. “Whichever ones you don’t want,” he said, “send them to me.