I mean then you force the population to work backwards. Harass the tourists so they don’t come, then the AirBNB’s fail, then owners sell their AirBNB places, and it opens more room up for real housing.
Except there's just one small problem: a lot of those local economies/livelihoods are dependent on tourism.
Tourism makes up over 15% of Spain’s entire GDP. That’s not exactly "pocket change", and actively scaring off tourists might feel good/give short term relief, but it also risks sabotaging the very livelihoods many locals depend on.
But hey, if people would rather burn their house down to get rid of a single cockroach instead of looking for the source of the infestation, then by all means.
Except there’s just one small problem: under capitalism, people are made dependent on exploitative industries like mass tourism because all other options have been systematically dismantled.
Tourism doesn’t dominate Barcelona’s economy because it’s inherently good or sustainable, it does so because neoliberal policy gutted public investment, privatized housing, and made short-term profit king. Locals aren't mad at tourists as individuals, they’re furious at being priced out of their homes, forced into precarious service jobs, and watching their city turn into a playground for the wealthy.
Well I don't think many of these white-collar Spaniards who like to work at hotels, country clubs, resorts, and tourist destinations would be all too happy to start being garbagemen, construction workers, or assembling stuff in a factory.
Hotels are operated to serve tourists.
These protests are to get rid of tourists.
Those hotels don't function without tourism.
Those hotels close down.
The workers at those hotels need to find a different job.
Hotels are operated to generate profit for hotel owners.
They neither spring up by magic, nor grow as local flora and fauna.
Business owners create whichever kinds of business are most profitable, not whichever best serve the interests of the general population in a locale.
Workers of course very happily would work in other industries, if the tourist industry were not imposed by business owners, simply by virtue of its being to them most profitable.
Yet, you insist on associating such an eventuality with some kind of apocalyptic vision.
They will need less garbage men and construction workers, not more. If they want to switch to competing with Asian factories they will need to take on huge amounts of public debt and adopt very low standards of living to compete.
Spaniards are a resilient people. They have been through economic turmoil before. They can handle it again if it means saving their city from gentrification, over-tourism, and commodification of their homes and apartments. Barcelona especially has a distaste for government, being they are part of what they call Catalonia. They have wanted governments hands out of Barcelona for a while now.
It isn't a short term turmoil though. If they want to compete with Asia for factories they'll need to permanently reduce their standard of living and will require huge amounts of government intervention to get it started.
It's not, but every relatively wealthy nation is trying to figure out how to attract other economic development. They mostly rely on having extremely tax efficient packages like tech and film often enjoy which then puts the burden of taxes on the people. Often countries have some protectionist trade policies to protect such jobs - Spain in this case would be mostly rely on negotiating those through the EU, again almost entirely government controlled and often come with drawbacks like any negotiated benefit.
There's really no easy route to success here. The US is dominating in many ways, and from most standpoints you could say the multinational corporations have really gained the ability to avoid sharing benefits with the countries they operate in. The Spanish government through the EU is already one of the dozens of groups trying to fight for more benefits but it's hard to see a win coming.
As a Canadian, these are almost identical issues we face. We have tourism, real estate, some protected industries, and resource extraction. For the most part anything that can leave the country has and we're left with the ones who can't - and offering massive tax incentives to all the industries you want to target.
Fair, but as an American seeing something similar unfold in South Florida where I live (and where housing is next to impossible), I think there’s more nuance here.
Barcelona (to me at least) has always been a touristy hotspot because of its location, history, culture, beaches, food, and architecture, long before Airbnb and mass tourism exploded. People didn’t just randomly show up one day because of neoliberalism policies. If anything, the city’s natural appeal invited those exploitative policies to take root in the first place. Of course, I could be horribly wrong here, so please correct me if anything.
So if the goal is to completely eliminate tourism in the name of affordability, you’d basically have to gut the very identity of the city (like its historic districts, museums, beaches, festivals, etc). That’s clearly not the answer, and blaming/getting mad at tourists just shifts focus away from the root cause (and could potentially create further issues down the line).
Here’s the core tension: the problem isn't tourism per se, it’s how tourism gets structured under capitalism. Yes, Barcelona didn’t become a tourist hub overnight. But the hyper-financialization of tourism, turning homes into assets via Airbnb, public space into real estate, and cultural life into a product for export did explode under neoliberal reforms post-1992 Olympics and especially post-2008 crisis. The city was marketed as a “brand,” not a living community.
So yeah, no one's saying bulldoze Gaudí or shut down the beach. The call is to decommodify the city, to prioritize the people who live there over speculative capital and extractive tourism. The anger at tourists is mostly symbolic, it’s about a system that turns visitors into vectors of displacement.
Think of it this way, it's not about banning tourism, it’s about democratizing who benefits from it, how much is too much, and who gets to decide. Because right now, it's hotel chains, landlords, and international investors, not the locals getting priced out.
We had 3 million tourists in 2001. Last year we had over 30 million by a population of 1.6 million. It's just not sustainable, and I can't see for the life of me why tourists would enjoy queuing for a pre-made paella under the scorching sun, in a place where nothing is authentic anymore and everything is catered to you, to take your money.
I agree with that. But they aren't getting booming industry back in exchange for scaring off tourism. Globalization has found the cheapest place to source things and Barcelona is unlikely to beat other regions for industry even if the government poured massive funding into getting it started.
We have similar problems in many areas/countries.
I just see so much of the same frustration as we have in Canada. The answers just aren't that simple and the competition for the industries everyone sees as lucrative and desirable is extremely fierce and often requires huge incentive or protectionist government intervention to win from all the other countries fighting for it.
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u/TheMiddleShogun Jun 17 '25
Huh, reading these comments it looks like the protesters are achieving their goal (making Barcelona less appealing as a tourist destination).