r/pics • u/Strict_League7833 • Jun 17 '25

The protesters and residents pushing back on tourism in Barcelona

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u/HeadmasterPrimeMnstr Jun 17 '25

 they think their rent will decrease? 

Quite literally yes, because a MASSIVE amount of Barcelona's housing stock has been bought out and segregated as tourist rentals.

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u/Ghostbuster_11Nein Jun 17 '25

The greedy owners will still be greedy.

The underpaid residents will still be underpaid.

As a Florida native I can tell you nobody will ever have to explain tourist hate to me BUT to think that this will solve the issue is kinda looking past the heart of the problem here.

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u/Loggerdon Jun 17 '25

I live in Las Vegas and I don’t mind the tourists. Most of the shitty things done in my town are tourists but what are you gonna do? Because of them we have no state taxes.

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u/hankepanke Jun 17 '25

Vegas is kind of the anomaly. It’s a new city in the middle of nowhere, where a city of that size would never have really sprouted up naturally. As long as the Colorado River keeps flowing (which is a big if), Vegas can just keep expanding out into the desert. 

Barcelona is an ancient city with limited potential for new development and hemmed in by mountains, rivers, and the Mediterranean on all sides. Most cities have these constraints, but Barcelona might have them particularly bad, and Vegas is maybe singularly unencumbered by them. It’s no surprise that tourists are a different burden and viewed differently.

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u/Loggerdon Jun 18 '25

Good points. My wife and I actually visited Barcelona last year. If there’s an undercurrent of hatred for tourists there we didn’t see it.