Wish you weren’t here! How tourists are ruining
the world’s greatest destinations
Overtourism has long been a problem – and besieged
cities are fighting back. But can angry locals stop the tide of stag parties,
‘anus burners’, noise and graffiti?
Zoe
Williams
@zoesqwilliams
Thu 17 Aug
2023 05.00 BST
Ivan Bera,
24, has always loved the feeling of being naked. He says that when he was about
17, he “ decided to try it in public”, with his then girlfriend. Since then, “I
have been very busy with the associations in Catalonia,” he tells me. The
Catalan naturist-nudist scene is rich, decades-old and organised. Bera is a
member of Joves Naturistes, which is for 18- to 35-year-olds; last week the
all-ages Naturist-Nudist Federation of Catalonia made a public appeal for
tourists wearing swimsuits to stay away from their beaches.
“Legally,
we can practise it everywhere: there is no law against nudism in Spain,” Bera
says. “But most naturists prefer to practise it in secluded areas with a
tradition of it. Those areas are being invaded, mostly in the summer months, by
tourists who not only wear swimsuits, but also have a very disrespectful manner
to nudists. We feel displaced in our own spaces and we fear losing them.”
For many
naturists, the presence of people wearing bikinis is enough to alter the beach
for the worse, although Bera says he doesn’t mind having clothed people around.
But the behaviour isn’t great – “there are some people who harass nudists, and
there are voyeuristic activities and suchlike” – and the insensitivity extends
to the natural environment. “In general terms, people who are disrespectful to
nudism are disrespectful to nature, and they pollute the area in all kinds of
ways.”
It is
especially galling because the traditionally nudist beaches are chosen for
their seclusion, which often coincides with picture-postcard beauty. So
visitors come for the postcard (for younger readers: the Instagram backdrop),
and in so doing, turn the beach from three dimensions – a place with history,
community and a counter-culture – to two.
The public
appeal for tourists in swimsuits to stay away caught the world’s attention. It
animated a question playing out in beauty spots and heritage sites all over the
world: when tourists flock to a place, do they change its character, wipe out
its idiosyncrasies, without even noticing what those idiosyncrasies are? Is
there an impact on the residents more important than a boost to ice-cream
sales? Can you commodify beauty without tainting it? When does tourism become
overtourism?
In the 20
years running up to Covid, international tourism doubled, to 2.4 billion
arrivals in 2019. Overall, tourism last year was at 63% of its pre-Covid
levels. Every place has its own post-Covid recovery story: Thailand has taken a
while and is, at a state level at least, very welcoming to visitors; France has
yet to see the same numbers of Chinese and Japanese visitors as before; in
Paris – the most popular destination in the world – numbers this year are
expected to be almost exactly as they were four years ago, 38.5 million. But
people increasingly don’t want a bounce back. Tourist transport accounts for 5%
of global emissions, and people are flying into the heatwaves those create. It
is all a bit on the nose.
Despite the crowds that descend on Rome, the city,
unlike Venice, has managed to maintain some sense of normality for residents.
“I think it
really helps to think of travelling as a kind of consumption,” says Frederik
Fischer, CEO and founder of the social enterprise Neulandia, which connects
creative digital workers to rural communities in Germany. “If you only consume
another country, or you only consume a city, I’m not sure you’re really doing a
benefit to the people and the place.”
Every
location has a different challenge with tourists. On Catalan beaches, it may be
that they are wearing too many clothes; in Barcelona, there are simply too many
people. Whether that turns the entire place into a giant hotel (9.5 million
people stayed in Barcelona’s hotels in 2019, a fivefold increase on 1990) or a
human traffic-jam (one-way walking systems have been introduced in Barcelona’s
city centre), it is impossible to imagine that being a pleasant, livable
experience for the host citizens.
In
Dubrovnik, tourists are just too annoying. The story went around this summer
that wheelie suitcases had been banned from the cobbled old town, an
interdiction with quite a substantial fine (€265). In fact, it was just a video
suggesting that if people would only pick up their bags, that would be a lot
less grating. All the pleas in Croatia’s Respect the City campaign are modest –
please don’t fool around on our statuary, or walk around shirtless – but you
can hear the quiet desperation you might predict, when a city of 41,000 people
greets 1.5 million tourists a year.
Jon Henley,
the Guardian’s Europe correspondent, based in Paris, says there is a similar
story to Dubrovnik in places such as Prague and Budapest: “Wherever you’ve got
a medieval city centre, those become unbearable.” Paris, with its wide
boulevards and relatively large city centre, suffers less; when the French
tourism minister, Olivia Grégoire, announced a strategy to prevent overtourism
earlier this year, her focus was on sites such as Mont-Saint-Michel abbey in
Normandy and the Channel beach Étretat, which aren’t large enough for everyone
who wants to see them. In the capital, at peak tourist season, all the
Parisians, including many in hospitality and retail, are away. “I quite like it
in August in Paris for precisely that reason,” Henley says. “Confused-looking
tourists wondering why everything’s shut.” If Paris is very tolerant of
tourists, Saint-Tropez is getting close to its hard limit on the ones who don’t
tip properly.
Amsterdam
is at the vanguard of the stay-away movement. The city council decided this
summer to close the cruise ship terminal in the city centre, specifically
citing its sustainability goals. But there is always a subtext, which is often
the text, with Dutch imprecations about tourism, which is that people
(especially British people) go there specifically to behave like animals. There
possibly isn’t a city in the world, medieval or not, that could cope with a
visit from a group of Britons who had gone there specifically to get off their
heads for 72 hours without stopping. An online campaign launched in the spring,
with ads triggered whenever anyone in the UK entered “stag party Amsterdam” or
“pub crawl Amsterdam” into a search engine, warned people of the possible
consequences – fines, arrests, hospitalisation, making life completely
miserable for residents – of hedonistic frenzy. The deputy mayor for economic
affairs, Sofyan Mbarki, released a statement at the time: “Visitors are still
welcome, but not if they misbehave and cause nuisance. As a city, we are
saying: we’d rather not have this, so stay away.”
Tourists in Amsterdam in spring this year. The city
has started online campaigns against people travelling there to misbehave.
Other
cities can increasingly relate to this. A video did the rounds this week in
which a woman walks across the Trevi fountain in Rome to fill her water bottle.
In June, a guy was filmed carving his and his girlfriend’s names into the
Colosseum. Before you even consider the destinations that people go to
specifically to behave badly – Aiya Napa, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Ghent (the
Belgian city is considering banning stag party-friendly beer bikes) – there is
always this problem that, as Cornish business owner Mati Ringrose says: “When
you go on holiday, it’s not your place, it’s not your community, so you act
completely differently, and out of character.” It cannot go unremarked that
British tourists are notorious for this. The streets of “Europe’s latest booze
hotspot”, Split, in Croatia, are festooned with signs in English warning of
fines for public drinking, vomiting and urinating. One girl complained to a
reporter this week that the fines were unfair, as she was quite likely to
vomit, having had too many “anus burners” (shots of tequila, orange juice and
tabasco).
Then there
are digital nomads, itinerant workers who, every month or two, move between
beauty spots in locations such as Bali, Mexico City, Lisbon, Chiang Mai in
Thailand and Medellín in Colombia. These people would style themselves as the
opposite of tourists, although as Dave Cook, an anthropologist at University
College London, says: “I’d speak to the Chiang Mai coffee shop owner, and
they’d say: ‘they’re in a coffee shop and they’re speaking English, so as far
as we’re concerned, they’re just tourists.’” Before the pandemic, Cook says,
lifestyle migration was a very niche phenomenon, which would include expats but
was more of a counter-cultural movement, people specifically rejecting the
worker-bee ethic of life in an office. Since Covid, there have been more strands:
the freelance knowledge worker, the digital nomad business owner and the
salaried digital nomad, which was more or less unheard of pre-pandemic.
“Digital nomads talk about ‘dating’ locations: they’re geographically
polyamorous,” Cook says. “Resentment can creep in, but what happens in reality
is digital nomads might fall in love, but the locals have an intuitive
understanding that they’re going to be left.”
Digital nomads have altered rental prices in many
cities, such as Lisbon, beyond recognition.
What people
often object to about visitors, whether they are tourists, expats, retirees or
digital nomads, is what they do to property prices. Lisbon is the prime example
of a city altered beyond recognition, to many people’s eyes denatured by an
influx of people who could just afford higher rents. Michael Oliveira Salac,
who is half-British, half-Portuguese and splits his time between London and the
Algarve, says it was a combination of tourists and nomadic financial technology
workers, who, between creating Airbnb demand and being able to afford much
higher long-term rents, forced Lisbon residents out of the city. The minimum
wage in Portugal is €760 (£650) a month. It is not possible to compete with an
influx of people paying €1,000 a month for a two-bed and laughing about how
cheap that is. That creates a cascade effect, Oliveira Salac says. “The main
avenue, where there used to be old multibrand boutiques, now Gucci has come in,
Prada has come in, so that’s shot the rents up.” The newcomers “want sushi,
they want Thai food, they want vegan. The old lot can’t cater to that, so
they’ve shut down. Lisbon has lost its soul.” And that picture has played out
in Porto, even in some towns in the Algarve: Portugal sits on this axis, where
it is comparatively cheap, very beautiful and in the right time zone for a lot
of nomads, which from a resident’s perspective is a curse, like sitting on a
fault line.
Venice is
probably ground zero of the overtoured effect; tourists and residents have hit
bed-for-bed parity, which makes normal life in the service of anything other
than a tourist unviable. It creates a theme-park effect, to which even Rome –
home to the most melodramatic monuments – hasn’t succumbed. In Rome, you can
still at least glimpse the life underneath the day trip; in Venice, despite a
recent clampdown on city-dwarfing cruise ships, Unesco recently threatened to
“blacklist” the city as a world heritage site, citing Italy’s failure to
protect it from mass tourism and the climate crisis.
You have to wonder whether it is worth it. Ringrose, who runs a shop in Redruth in Cornwall, isn’t technically homeless because she lives in a van with her seven-month-old child, but she says even parking charges have skyrocketed. “I have so many friends in emergency housing, it’s insane,” she says. In the summer, Cornish resort towns such as St Ives are so crowded that Ringrose has a disabled friend who has to move out because she can’t get down the street. Then, in the winter, she says: “There are whole towns that you go in and there’s no lights on half the year. There’s nothing open. There are no pubs there. Whole swathes of what used to be communities are shut down. It massively affects the mentality of the county.”
Redruth is relatively untouched by tourism because it is not coastal, and “it’s a really deprived area,” Ringrose says, “but it’s not deprived of community. Redruth is ridiculously rich in nice people, because it’s not a tourist town.” Ringrose tells me about a beach in Polzeath with a fence in the middle that someone built to stop people walking along the bottom of their garden. She tells me about the woman at a car boot sale who bought a jumper off her for a tenner, and asked her to split a £50 note. “I have never been given a 50 in a car boot, ever.” At the planning level, at the level of society, every desirable place on earth will have a variant of the Cornish question: if tourism brings in 12% of its income, yet takes up almost all of its housing, so that the lives of the residents don’t function any more, how can that be OK. At the level of the tourist or the nomad, the proposition is as simple, but an easier fix: look around – if everyone else is naked, either get
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