Barcelona residents throw water at tourists to protest overtourism

Major tourism trouble culminated in Barcelona on Saturday, with protesters hurling objects at tourists, showering them with water pistols and cans of drinks and chanting “tourists go home”.

Protesters, outraged by the city’s long-standing problem of overtourism, used thick police-style tape to block hotel entrances and sidewalk cafes in the tiny Barceloneta district in a symbolic move.

According to local media, the crowd of about 3,000 people marched carrying a large banner demanding that city authorities “reduce tourism now”.

Videos and photos showed people trying to avoid the crowds – some leaving their tables mid-meal – and others, including restaurant staff, arguing with anti-tourism activists.

The protests coincide with Barcelona’s peak summer travel period, with the city of 1.6 million people set to swell to accommodate more than 4 million tourists in 2023, and hotel occupancy rates approaching 80% in July and August, according to the Barcelona city council.

But relations between locals and tourists had been deteriorating for much longer.

According to Barcelona city council, the city’s hotels will quadruple between 1990 and 2023 to accommodate a surge in tourists, who jumped from 1.7 million to 7.8 million in the same period, though the city council points out that this doesn’t include the millions who travel to the city’s outskirts.

The city is overwhelmed by thousands of day-trippers as Barcelona’s cruise port struggles to cope, handling 2.2 million passengers in 2023, up from 560,000 in 2000, according to its website.

The result, activists say, is making the city uninhabitable for many locals, with Barcelona’s mayor, Jaume Corboni, saying the most obvious cause is the housing market, where rents have risen 68 percent in the past decade.

Mayor Corboni announced in June that the city would ban short-term home rentals like Airbnb by 2028, a move that would put about 10,000 apartments back on the long-term rental market.

A report published by Barcelona City Council in 2023 titled “Perceptions of Tourism in Barcelona” showed that more and more residents believe that tourism is beneficial to the city rather than harmful, but that the gap is narrowing year by year.

Half of the 1,860 respondents surveyed said they are changing their destinations in the city because of tourists: “They are avoiding large areas of the city centre (Plaza Catalunya, Las Ramblas, the Gothic Quarter, the Raval, the old town and the waterfront) and the Sagrada Família area. As for specific locations, Park Güell tops the list of places they purposely avoid.”

The report said that even people who recognise tourism’s economic contribution are becoming disillusioned with the number of tourists in the city.

“Increasingly, people believe that Barcelona has reached its limits in terms of its capacity to accommodate tourists,” the report said.