Protesters in Barcelona have sprayed visitors with water as part of a demonstration against mass tourism.
Protesters in Barcelona have sprayed visitors with water as part of a demonstration against mass tourism.
Demonstrators marching through areas popular with tourists on Saturday chanted “tourists go home” and squirted them with water pistols, while others carried signs with slogans including “Barcelona is not for sale.”
Thousands of protesters took to the streets of the city in the latest demonstration against mass tourism in Spain, which has seen similar actions in the Canary Islands and Mallorca recently, decrying the impact on living costs and quality of life for local people.
The demonstration was organised by a group of more than 100 local organizations, led by the Assemblea de Barris pel Decreixement Turístic (Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth).
I fucking guarantee every single one of the locals out there spraying people and yelling at tourists has been a tourist at some point in their life. Even if it was for a day trip to Madrid or Valencia or Bilbao, they were tourists who didn't deserve to be attacked just for seeing some place new. They are just hateful hypocrites who like annoying people for fun.
They have a legitimate concern with housing prices and how the government has allowed (until recently) Airbnb to drive up their housing costs. But the tourists aren't the problem. And if they want to get rid of all tourists, let them A) find out how much their economy relies on tourism, and B) never be allowed to leave their city again.
Screw these guys. Whatever your position on the matter it's not the tourists themselves who are culpable, but the national and local government for allowing their economy to be so reliant on tourism.
It doesn't justify assaulting and harassing people in the streets.
Barcelona is not the only city in the world that attracts a large number of tourists. Many cities attract more. Yet Barcelona is the only place I see with so many of these xenophobic nutjobs.
However, the Assemblea de Barris pel Decreixement Turístic says that these visitors increase prices and put pressure on public services, while profits from the tourism industry are unfairly distributed and increase social inequality.
The greedy local businesses and the local government letting them keep their probably ridiculous profits is the problem here.
I don’t even know if they are right or wrong about this, but I stand 1,000% in favor of people getting out in the streets with their water pistols and being the change they want to see in the world
Fuck ‘em up boys, fuck ‘em up. Get those tourists the fuck outta here like a buncha cats that went on the counter.
What is the temperature in Barcelona right now? I would imagine getting hit with a water gun would feel pretty nice on a hot day of walking around doing touristy stuff.
I can understand the residents and where they're coming from, but protesting against the tourists themselves, people who have already made the trip and are there for a week or two before they fuck off home and who probably don't care and definitely have no control over local politics, rather than against the local owning class making all of the money off of the tourists and who encourage them to keep coming, and the authorities that they pay to enable them, seems like completely missing the point.
I live in a tourism-dependent city and the main problem isn’t tourists as much as AirBnB and similar services fucking up residential neighborhoods, raising rents, etc. And even then, it’s not the original AirBnB concept (of renting your place or spare bedroom out) as much as investors (often institutional investors) buying up dozens of properties and acting as unlicensed, less regulated hoteliers.
I’d be fine with AirBnB if they voluntarily limited that sort of shit or were forced to do it via strong regulations or punitive taxes. We have some OKish regulations. There’s permits and restrictions on density — one per block in residential areas, basically — but lobbyists got involved so half the regulations are about protecting the hotel industry instead of protecting the limited housing stock. And it all relies on AirBnB enforcing the rules when they have the opposite incentive.
My personal experiences of this have been being yelled "Go home, tourist!" when I make innevitable driving mistakes in a rental car, while in an area that clearly needs all the tourism money it can get.
People new to or unfamiliar with their "home town" often don't realise tourism is part of the backbone they enjoy, even if a muscle gets pulled now and again.
You mean to tell me you DON'T want people to visit your beautiful city? Then why did you make it so beautiful in the first place? Attracting tourists is an inevitable side effect of that. Just treat them nicely, and they'll treat you back nicely.
Though now I wanna visit Barcelona just to be sprayed with a water gun, it sounds so fun. Just please ask people for consent if you wanna do that.