‘I have
no neighbours’: overtourism pushes residents in Spain and Portugal to the limit
As visitor
numbers hit record levels in southern Europe, some residents are surrounded
entirely by tourist flats
Ashifa
Kassam
Ashifa
Kassam European community affairs correspondent
Sat 25 Jan
2025 05.00 GMT
When her
husband, who had cancer at the time, took a tumble in the couple’s sixth-floor
flat last year, Maria frantically wondered who she could call for help to lift
him.
In another
building, another era, she might have dashed next door to ask a neighbour. But
it wasn’t an option in her 11-unit building in central Lisbon, where tourist
flats had proliferated and turned long-term residents into a rarity.
She resorted
to calling the fire service. But the moment stuck with her, hinting at the
community she had lost as a ceaseless rotation of tourists moved in and out of
all but three of the building’s units.
“I really
miss it. We should be a kind of social network,” said Maria, who asked that her
full name not be published. “And that social network doesn’t exist.”
The
71-year-old is among those who have been left to grapple with southern Europe’s
overtourism problem in the most intimate of ways: trading neighbours for a
steady stream of suitcase-totting tourists in their buildings’ elevators,
hallways and lobbies.
As tourist
arrivals swell to record numbers in Spain and Portugal, some residents have
found themselves living in buildings where tourist flats make up the majority
of units. In the most extreme cases, residents have been left on their own,
surrounded entirely by tourist flats.
“It’s very
weird. Imagine, I have no neighbours, even though I’m in the middle of a big
city,” said Alex, who lives in a building in Lisbon where every single other
unit is rented via platforms such as Airbnb. “It’s like I live in a ghost
place. There’s plenty of people, I just don’t know anybody.”
As the only
owner who lives in the building, it has fallen to Alex to report rubbish left
at the entrance or names scratched into the elevator door. “I’m a pain and I
hate that too,” said Alex, who asked that their full name not be published. “I
didn’t sign up for this.”
While Alex
described the abundance of tourist flats as understandable given the city’s
reliance on tourism, it was dismaying to see the personal costs that some were
forced to bear.
“If I need
sugar or if I have an emergency, there’s no door I can knock on,” said Alex.
“We are planning on moving because I can no longer handle not having a
community.”
In Barcelona
one retiree, who for more than a decade has lived below two tourist flats, said
she had become known to local police after years of calling them to break up
parties that regularly stretch past 3am.
“It’s
horrible, absolutely horrible,” said Esther, who asked that her full name not
be published. “It’s inhumane – nobody should live like this.”
The
69-year-old said she had seen all sorts of people pass through the building.
“People leave broken bottles around the building, or urine and faeces in the
stairwell. Some throw rubbish off the balcony,” she said.
“One time
someone brought [sex workers] here and proceeded to have sex on the balcony, in
view of all the neighbours.”
She now
lived constantly on edge, battling anxiety after years of bracing herself for
who might turn up next. “You just never know what to expect,” she said.
About 700
miles away in Lisbon, the sentiment was echoed by Joao Povoa. “I live
sandwiched in between two tourist flats: one below and one above,” the
43-year-old said.
Neighbours
in his five-unit building, a stone’s throw from the city’s Praça do Comércio,
began leaving about 10 years ago. “It’s just totally different now. To be
honest, you don’t know anybody … it’s like being in a hotel.”
Unlike a
hotel, however, tourists in these flats were traipsing through an 18th-century
building with wood floors, where little consideration had been given to noise
insulation. “It makes you a bit anxious sometimes,” he said. “It’s a bit of a
lottery because you never know if they are going to behave or not.”
He brushed
off any possibility of moving. While Lisbon’s soaring cost of housing meant
there was little chance of finding a similar, centrally located, property, he
also felt called to resist leaving an area where just one traditional cafe
remained amid a sea of trendy brunch spots aimed at tourists. “We have to try.
Because if you give up, then there’s going to be nobody living here – the
community is shrinking.”
The six
locals who spoke to the Guardian from Lisbon and Barcelona highlighted fairly
similar concerns about being surrounded by tourist flats: lifts that are often
broken from regularly hauling suitcases and cleaning carts, never-ending noise
concerns as tourists party, slam doors and hold late-night gab sessions and the
disorienting experience of living with a relentless stream of strangers
parading through the building’s common areas.
In early
December, Lurdes Pinheiro, who lives Lisbon, decided she had had enough. For a
decade, neighbours had trickled out of her five-floor building in the city’s
Alfama neighbourhood, only to be swiftly replaced by tourists. “We decided to
move out to places that still had some community.”
One of the
hardest parts of moving was saying goodbye to the handful of residents still
left in the building. “One of them started crying, saying: ‘We’re losing all
our neighbours’,” she said. “It was painful, we had been living in the same
place for more than 30 years.”
It is
exactly that kind of community that Maite Martin and her neighbours have been
scrambling to preserve in Barcelona’s Eixample neighbourhood.
When she and
her family moved into their flat in 2000, Martin had been certain that she was
going to live there for the rest of her life. She poured her own funds into
renovating the rental to make it more comfortable, upgrading the windows and
overhauling the washrooms.
Then came
news that the building’s owner had been granted permission to convert all the
120 units into tourist flats. With the help of a local housing syndicate, the
tenants began fighting back, leading to a halt in the conversion of flats until
a court settled the matter.
Until then,
the building is home to 33 flats that are rented to tourists and other
short-term visitors, giving rise to an unusual clash of cultures.
“Last year,
February, I’ll never forget it. We had one Italian tourist in the flat upstairs
decide to vomit – I repeat, vomit – in the interior courtyard where everyone
hangs their clothes to dry,” Martin said. “Just as well that I had the plastic
rain curtain there. Because he would have vomited all over the laundry.”
At times,
the smell of marijuana has wafted through the corridors, while it has become
common to find cigarette butts tossed on to their balconies. One time she went
to the tourist flat above her own to ask about an incessant noise – “My son
said to me, it’s like somebody is tap dancing” – only to be confronted by an
angry drummer who insisted he needed to practice, while another time the
building’s porter was called in to break up a party of 24 people in a flat
meant for six.
Martin and
her neighbours are not the only ones pushing back against the proliferation of
tourist flats. In Lisbon, more than 6,600 residents recently signed a call for
a binding referendum on whether the city should ban tourist flats in
residential blocks.
In
Barcelona, the residents in Esther’s building have turned to the courts in
hopes of removing the licences for the building’s two tourist flats. Last
summer tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets across Spain,
calling for curbs on mass tourism and a rethink of a business model that they
blamed for pushing up housing prices and driving local residents out of cities.
While Martin
welcomed the battle, she had also resigned herself to the idea that she would
probably be pushed out to make way for more-profitable tourist flats.
“I’m
fighting here, we’re all fighting here, because I think we’ve got to do it,”
she said. “But it makes me cry sometimes because the landlord, as the owner,
has the last say. So if he doesn’t want to renew the lease, he’s got all the
right to do so.”
In the
meantime, however, the cumulation of factors – the steady erosion of the
building’s once-vibrant community and the constant travails of living alongside
tourists with little respect for the place she calls home – had taken a toll.
“I’m a
sociable person, I really am. But it gets to the point that when I see somebody
with a suitcase, I just turn away,” she said. “And I know it’s not their fault.
I’m a tourist too, because my husband and I, we’ve travelled often. And now I’m
at the other end.”
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