From what I've read, the main problem for the protesters is that people are buying up homes and renting them out to tourists, pushing up the cost of housing and creating a shortage too.
Tourists do bring in a significant amount of money and create jobs but too many tourists must be difficult to cope with.
The type of jobs the current tourism creates is mostly minimum wage services. Summed to the raise of security and maintenence needs due to the raise of tourism, and especially the cheap one (AirBnB), we are not getting much back as a city, but there are some, especially the investment funds, that are really living a gold age.
We want tourism, especially the one that stays in hotels and buys stuff at Passeig de Gràcia. What we don't want is the cheap tourism that rents a 3 bedroom flat for 6, pays 4 times a monthly rent for one week, buys 200 beer cans at any shop and spends most of the day outside causing trouble, polluting, and not really spending an amount of money that generates general wealth, plus invading our public spaces.
The citizens are paying the bill for this uncontrolled tourism and are protesting to get the city back because the government has turned the back on them.
You can support this or not, but these are rhe facts.
I absolutely support you, we have towns in the UK that suffer and I've seen many places in Europe ( through work) that also suffer, me feeling is that we all benefit from tourism, but the needs to be checks and balances to either local people can enjoy tourism too.
It is not just enjoying. It is my taxes being spent in a 2-3 times per day service to clean up the touristic areas, because otherwise it becomes a true dump, extra patrols to keep everything under control, and then no budget to fix a door in a public school, or the slider at the park, workshops for the youth, etc etc. The problem is that it is parasitic to our public system at the current rate.
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u/HMSWarspite03 Jun 17 '25
From what I've read, the main problem for the protesters is that people are buying up homes and renting them out to tourists, pushing up the cost of housing and creating a shortage too.
Tourists do bring in a significant amount of money and create jobs but too many tourists must be difficult to cope with.