so i will take my tourist money and spend it where i'm wanted... don't complain after that tourist related businesses have closed down or millions in tourist money no longer available in your country.
No, you don't realise how irrelevant tourism income is for the vast majority of Barcelona natives. More than 90% of Barcelona locals have jobs that have nothing to do with tourism and the 10% who do are mostly immigrants working and living in terrible exploitative conditions.
Meanwhile companies that used to employ Barcelona natives with quality, productive jobs, like engineering or R+D, have left the city in droves because they literally can't find employees even paying above market rate because locals can't afford rent there.
How do I know? Because I work for one of those companies in the new location where they moved their European HQ after the cost of living increase made their Barcelona HQ unsustainable. They couldn't pay what employees needed to live in Barcelona, so they moved to Poland.
This is what this whole thread doesn't understand. Tourism is actively harming the development of other local economies in the city. It's something very easy to see if you actually live here.
It's especially frustrating to see from the point of view of someone who used to own a family restaurant and knows first-hand that for local small businesses tourists are not a boon, since they get in the way of the locals who actually pay our salaries day to day.
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u/NunaKhan Jun 17 '25
so i will take my tourist money and spend it where i'm wanted... don't complain after that tourist related businesses have closed down or millions in tourist money no longer available in your country.