Barcelona is parched — and angry at quenched tourists

 

Barcelona is parched — and angry at quenched tourists

 

The yawning gap between locals’ and visitors’ consumption is stoking long-standing resentments ahead of an election.

 

MAY 7, 2024 5:00 AM CET

BY ZIA WEISE

https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-barcelona-tourists-catalonia-anger-rain-water-drought/

 

BARCELONA, Spain — As rain poured into Catalonia’s parched capital, the tourists did, too.

 

Yet while a damp April brought some relief to the drought-stricken Spanish region — which has been living under rain-starved skies for over three years — the crescendoing tourist season did not.

 

After all, spring is when visitors start spilling into Barcelona’s streets each morning from cruise ships, hotels and Airbnbs — and consuming considerably more of the city’s water than the average resident, threatening to push Barcelona’s water supply to the breaking point.

 

The disconnect has locals fulminating. While Catalan municipalities have faced water consumption limits since the region declared a drought emergency in early February, the tourism sector has largely escaped restrictions.

 

Those tensions have spilled into regional elections scheduled for May 12 — a snap vote called following a political fight over a water-guzzling construction project targeted at tourists.

 

“Flats in Barcelona have efficient showers and so on. But there are many millions of people visiting every year, and in terms of waste and water use, they behave like people here did 30 years ago,” Vicenç Acuña, director of the Catalan Institute for Water Research, said.

 

Given its importance to the region’s economy, local authorities have treated the sector with kid gloves, he added. “There has been no pressure on the touristic sector to change.”

 

On Tuesday, days before the vote, the regional government said it would soon ease water restrictions due to recent rainfall. Some opposition candidates suspect an election maneuver — and an attempt “ to save hotel pool season.”

 

Some 30 million people visit Barcelona annually, with numbers peaking in the hot and dry summer months. That’s an economic boon to the city. But there’s also rising local resentment against tourists, who are seen as overburdening public services and resources.

 

Barcelona city hall estimates that local households use 99 liters of water per person per day, far below the Spanish and European average, while tourists staying in hotels use 163 liters per day. Those figures do not include the consumption of day-trippers and cruise passengers, who account for more than half of visitors to the city.

 

Yet some say tourism is simply an easy scapegoat.

 

Eduard Rivas, president of the Federation of Catalan Municipalities, criticized what he sees as a growing trend to blame tourists for many of the region’s problems.

 

“For these people, the issue is that tourists will have more rights than normal citizens regarding drought. You can’t make a law that targets just people coming to Barcelona or Catalonia,” he said. But he acknowledged: “That is something that’s really difficult.”

 

No rain, no plan

Despite recent rainfall, Catalonia’s reservoirs are running low: As of late April, their fill level stands at 22 percent. The strategic Sau reservoir, which supplies Barcelona, stands at about 10 percent. That’s up from 2.5 percent since before the rains arrived, but still only a 10th of its average monthly level.

 

Acuña noted that before the last three-ish years, Barcelona had as much annual rainfall as London — a city famous for its damp, gray skies. But since then, he said, Barcelona has had “less than half,” the annual rainfall of London — a devastating drop.

 

It’s the region’s worst drought on record and a glimpse into Catalonia’s future. Climate change is rapidly heating up southern Europe, and dry spells are expected to become more frequent and more intense as the planet warms.

 

But Catalonia can’t blame its problems on climate change entirely, experts say.

 

“Our vulnerability to drought is in a big part our own fault because we're not managing the water to ensure we can cope,” said Annelies Broekman, a researcher at the Center for Ecological Research and Forestry Application, which is based at the University of Barcelona.

 

Broekman, Acuña and other researchers say the Generalitat, Catalonia’s regional government, has failed to prepare for prolonged drought, delaying necessary infrastructure investments.

 

When the situation went critical earlier this year, with reservoir levels falling to 15 percent, the authorities had little choice but to impose drastic emergency measures.

 

Since February, more than 200 Catalan municipalities have been restricted to 200 liters of water per capita per day — a figure covering domestic use for drinking and washing, as well as other non-industrial water use, such as in the hospitality sector. That could fall to 160 liters if the drought worsens.

 

Industry and agriculture are also subject to significant cuts, with the emergency decree slashing water use for crop irrigation by 80 percent, for livestock by 50 percent and for industry by 25 percent.

 

If the government relaxes drought restrictions, municipalities’ allowance would rise to 230 liters per person per day, while mandatory reductions for agriculture, livestock and industry would ease slightly.

 

The tourism industry faced no restrictions until mid-April, when, under growing pressure, the government said that in municipalities exceeding the 200-liter limit for three months or more, tourists in hotels would be restricted to using 100 liters a day.

 

In practice, activists and researchers say this will have little impact. Barcelona’s current overall consumption is 153 liters per person per day, according to the city hall, meaning the restrictions won’t apply to the city’s hotels.

 

Barcelona at the limit

Barcelona’s options for reducing households’ water use are limited.

 

According to the United Nations, 50 to 100 liters per capita per day are required to guarantee the human right to water and sanitation.

 

Household use in Barcelona already sits just below the upper limit, said Laia Bonet, the city’s deputy mayor in charge of urban planning and the green transition.

 

“The city has done its homework, the citizens have done their homework,” she added. “If we look at domestic consumption only, it’s 99 liters per inhabitant per day.” 

 

To prepare for the future, the city is investing in the groundwater network, water trucks and water reuse. Bonet is preparing legislation to ensure new buildings — as well as existing buildings with high water use, including hotels — use wastewater to flush toilets.

 

Much of the water used in the city is already recycled. Reclaimed water — from treating wastewater or desalination — currently provides more than half of the metropolitan area’s needs, said Acuña, the head of the water research institute.

 

“That’s quite high," he said.

 

To guarantee supply for the summer, the Generalitat — which declined to answer questions for this article — announced plans to spend millions on 12 mobile desalination plants placed along the Costa Brava starting in June, as well as a floating plant anchored at Barcelona’s port.

 

Bonet — a member of the opposition Catalan Socialists — said the city hadn’t been consulted about the new plant and suggested the government was simply trying to mask years of inaction ahead of the regional election.

 

“The responsibility of the Generalitat is to invest in the water supply network, to seek resources when you are not yet in a drought,” she said. “And that is what has not happened for the last 10 years.”

 

 

Rivas, the municipalities’ federation president, echoed Bonet's criticism. Districts exceeding the 200-liter limit have been subject to significant fines, he said, despite their limited control over tap water use.

 

“It's not because of the municipalities that we are living in this situation. In the past 10 years, the Catalan government hasn’t made any investment in order to gain water,” he said.

 

Tourism tensions

Catalonia would not have elections in May without political tensions over mass tourism and its environmental impact.

 

Regional budget negotiations collapsed in March when one party made its support conditional on the government freezing a casino-hotel megaproject near Tarragona, south of Barcelona. Rather than do so, Catalan President Pere Aragonès called a snap vote.

 

The project’s opponents say the new property would consume as much water as a small town and embody Catalonia’s unsustainable tourism model.

 

“One of the main concerns is the huge amount of water this casino will use,” Dante Maschio Gastelaars, a spokesperson for the Aïgua és Vida (“Water is Life”) alliance, which campaigns for better water management in Catalonia, said.

 

The only reason for going ahead with this project is “to have even more tourism,” which is exactly what the region doesn’t need, he argues. The drought, he adds, shows that “we need to rethink our economy … the way we are a land of tourism and pools.”

 

The severe drought has unexpectedly turned environmental concerns into a top campaign issue in a region still consumed by the fallout from Catalonia’s failed secession push. Besides the casino, the proposed expansion of Barcelona’s airport is also stirring controversy. On Wednesday, Aïgua és Vida will host an electoral debate dedicated entirely to water scarcity.

 

Not everyone agrees with pointing the finger at tourists.

 

“Tourists, the problem is not water,” Jesús Carrera, a Barcelona-based groundwater hydrologist at Spain’s National Research Council, said. “What people are upset about is that the price of housing is going up because of Airbnb, that when you go downtown it has changed.”

 

Maschio admitted that tapping into popular discontent over mass tourism is a deliberate strategy.

 

Just before the coronavirus limited travel, the noise, overcrowding and gentrification brought by masses of tourists sparked fierce backlash from locals. After a brief pandemic-induced break, visitor numbers — and anti-tourist sentiment — are swelling again.

 

“Society is aware of this problem, and it was easy to link it to the drought situation,” Maschio said. “So we took advantage of it to create a platform with groups struggling against mass tourism.”

 

The wider region’s main problem, he said, is unsustainable water use in agriculture, particularly livestock farming. Spring and summer may be peak tourism season in Barcelona, but it’s also when Catalonia’s farms are most in need of irrigation.

 

Future visions

Besides reducing consumption, Catalonia urgently needs to reduce its dependence on rainfall, said Carrera, the hydrologist.

 

“There are a number of things that can be done,” he said, expressing hope that this drought has “hurt enough” for the Catalan government to invest in large-scale infrastructure.

 

Options include adding more desalination plants or drawing water from faraway rivers, although both are controversial: Barcelona earlier this year was forced to raise water bills due to the cost of desalination, and the idea of water transfers from the Ebro river was rejected by the neighboring Aragón region earlier this year.

 

Carrera’s favored option: Gigantic basins near the city that would capture water during periods of intense rainfall and let the ground slowly absorb it, thus recharging parched aquifers.

 

But for now, the government’s focus is on containing the drought emergency until the end of summer. 

 

To lower water use among tourists, the Catalan authorities invested in an awareness-raising campaign, with posters across Barcelona imploring visitors to “during your stay, save water.”

 

At the same time, they’ve insisted that tourists shouldn’t stay away and allowed swimming pools to be filled as long as they’re classified as a “climate refuge” to escape the heat.

 

Bonet, the deputy mayor, gave a diplomatic answer when asked about the impact of tourism — saying that in Barcelona, hotels’ water consumption had fallen sharply in recent years but that the yawning gap between locals’ and tourists’ water use had to shrink.

 

“The optimal scenario is that it does not matter who uses the water, whether it is the local or the visitor,” she said, with tourist consumption also falling below 100 liters.

 

But, she acknowledged, “That is not the reality we have now. We need to work on that, and faster than we did in the past.”