Eat, Pray, Pollute

This article first appeared in Truthdig on September 26, 2024

In Barcelona and beyond, people are rising up against a tourism industry that strains infrastructures, commodifies culture and destroys ecosystems.

In July, a crowd of 3,000 anti-tourism protesters descended with delighted malice on posh downtown Barcelona. They cordoned off hotels and eateries with hazard tape, as if demarcating a crime scene. They sprayed water guns at blithe holidaymakers seated in restaurants. Video footage showed unhappy couples and glowering young men chased from their seats by the mob, stunned at the indignity. 

Shouting “tourists go home,” the protesters held signs that read, “Barcelona is not for sale.” They spoke of “mass touristification” and inveighed against the greed of restaurateurs, hoteliers and Airbnb landlords who profit from the madding crowd while the average Catalan struggles to survive the skyrocketing costs of daily life. One of the protesters told an interviewer, “The city has turned completely for tourists. What we want is a city for citizens.” 

The revolt in Spain — resident population 47 million; yearly visitation 85 million — is no outlier in the hypervisited destination countries of Europe. From the Greek islands to Bologna and Venice, residents have risen up this year to say they will no longer accept the invasion of their native ground, as mass visitation strains infrastructure, natural resources and social sanity to the breaking point.  

Tourists in Germany (Credit: Unsplash)

It’s the culmination of years of exploitation and maltreatment, said writer Chris Christou, who produces The End of Tourism podcast. “In the last decade, especially in southern Europe, we’ve seen local movements sprout and mobilize —typically from the grassroots Left — against the relentless conversion of home into a veritable theme park for ignorant foreigners.”

From 1950 to 2018, the number of international tourists rose from 25 million to an all-time pre-COVID high of 1.4 billion, according to Statista. By 2030, almost 2 billion tourists are projected to visit destinations across the globe.  

“We’ve seen local movements sprout and mobilize … against the relentless conversion of home into a veritable theme park for ignorant foreigners.”

Christou has documented the industry’s long train of offenses: environmental degradation; cultural appropriation and what he calls petrification (“the stasis or congealing of culture’s flow or growth”); spiraling economic inequality; the Airbnbization of dwelling; gentrification and displacement; corporate and government nepotism; the revolving door of corruption between tourism bureaus and industry; the rise of an extreme precariat labor force; and, not least, “the spectacled surveillance of place that effectively turns home, for local residents, into a turnstile Disneyland.” The industry is also a sizable factor in climate heating, producing at least 8% of all greenhouse gases. 

Over the summer, the scourge of “overtourism” made headlines for the first time in the New York Times, the Guardian, Bloomberg, Forbes and Reuters. Mainstream media published images of thronged locales that had the character of Hieronymus Bosch’s visions of hell: people piling on one another, grasping, motioning, their forms indistinguishable, as the newly empowered consumers of the burgeoning global middle class swarm across Earth in record numbers. 

In Barcelona, the big money is in maintaining not a city for citizens but the flux of Boschian creatures. Some 26 million visitors crammed into Barcelona in 2023 and spent nearly $14 billion. The Barcelona city council and the Catalan government dedicate millions of taxpayer euros to ensure this continual flow through global marketing campaigns that sing the city’s praises. 

The pressures from hypervisitation and the greed of those who profit from it have become so great that residents have formed the Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth, whose purpose is to reverse the toxic touristification process. The group’s cofounder, 48-year-old Barcelonan Daniel Pardo, described touristification as “a transformation enacted on a territory and a population” by governments in collusion with commercial interests. He believes that degrowth of tourism means regulating it nearly out of existence. 

“It means not only regulating tourism markets but promoting other activities [for locals] in order to reduce the weight of tourism in the economy of the city,” Pardo told me. Most important is the recognition of the almost pathological dependence on tourism in Barcelona and the many places like it. The city has been shown to be painfully vulnerable to any unexpected crisis that upends travel patterns. 

“It happened with COVID,” said Pardo, and “happened before that with a terrorist attack and before that with a volcanic explosion in Iceland.” And it will happen, sooner or later, because of the climate crisis and unleashed geopolitical chaos. “Better than keeping on the tourism wheel, which smashes lives, territory and environment, let’s plan a transition process for Barcelona which reduces this risky dependence,” Pardo said. “How? Not easy to say, since nobody is trying that almost anywhere.”

One place to start is with the ideological error in how we think of leisure travel as a right rather than a privilege. 

“You cannot extend a model of tourism everybody thinks about to all the population. It’s impossible.”

Crowded airport (Credit: Unsplash)

“The right to fly does not exist. The right to tourism does not exist. You cannot extend a model of tourism everybody thinks about to all the population. It’s impossible,” Pardo said recently on The End of Tourism podcast. He added in an email to me that the central issue is “about the limits of the planet, something so many people absolutely do not want to hear about.”

The tourism explosion can reasonably be explained by the IPAT math formula used in the ecological sciences. Intended to measure how endless growth of modern industrial civilization strains a finite Earth, the formula states that impact equals population times affluence times technology. 

With IPAT in mind, one could argue that too many would-be travelers with newly acquired affluence have access to new technologies. Easy online bookings and guides, smartphones in general for facilitating and smoothing the travel experience, high-quality digital photography and video equipment for use by amateurs on social media, with its influencers driving place-based envy and desire — all this combines in a noxious stew on an overpopulated planet of societies abased by lust for money.

Barcelonans armed with water guns are engaged in direct action in defense of the place they call home, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  Those who oppose tourism today are in fact doing a service for humanity tomorrow.  The reality is that travel as we know it will have to end if societies are to meet the reductions in carbon emissions to keep warming below catastrophic levels. Most likely the industry — along with the billions who see an exotic vacation in their near future — will not accept that judgment.