Barcelona finally turned on its crowds of tourists

 It was the water pistol shot that echoed around the world.

In the summer of 2024, after years of enduring the pressures of overtourism, locals in Barcelona ramped up their protest, with thousands gathering to chant “tourists go home.” But it was a small group armed with toy water pistols who made headlines by squirting them at visitors seated in outdoor cafes.

A mischievous, seemingly harmless act, perhaps. Yet as pictures of the incident spread globally, the firepower of those toy weapons soon became apparent. Barcelona’s longstanding tensions over the city’s transformation into a tourist playground had erupted into very public hostility.

The surprise squirt attack, criticized by some top tourism officials, was also emblematic of a situation ongoing in many other destinations, from Amsterdam to Bali, where local residents face being priced out of their own homes by a global tourism industry that gets bigger and more expansive every year.

Barcelona, like many of these places, also faces another problem. While mass tourism might be putting a strain on the city, it’s also vital to its existence, providing jobs and income. Tourism is now 14% of the city’s economy and provides 150,000 jobs, said Mateu Hernández, director of the Barcelona Tourism Consortium.

It’s a balancing act the city’s tourism officials are only too aware of as Barcelona prepares for the arrival of throngs of visitors this summer. Even as measures are enacted aimed at helping protect local residents, there have been official concerns that many tourists may not feel welcome.

Hernández, whose Consortium is the city’s tourism promotion board, pointed to “a perception that Barcelona doesn’t want tourists. We are worried about Barcelona’s image of overtourism,” he told a group of foreign correspondents in Madrid in January.

Now, authorities are working to change perceptions before this summer arrives. Visitors will certainly still come — a newly opened cruise terminal has the potential to bring in many thousands more tourists — but will some stay away?

Before the crowds

Tourism wasn’t always a problem in Barcelona. For years the capital of Spain’s northeastern Catalonia region welcomed a steady but sustainable flow of visitors there to savor the beautiful architecture and Mediterranean lifestyle.

Then came the Barcelona 1992 Summer Olympics. In its runup, an urban renewal upgraded the airport, removed railroad tracks and industry located along the Mediterranean and installed beaches. The Games then provided a spotlight for the style and culture of the historic city that had opened to the sea.

By 2004, Barcelona, a city of 1.5 million residents, received 4.5 million tourists who stayed overnight. The airport soon added a third runway and a new terminal. Ryanair began low-cost flights there in 2010. More cruise ship terminals were built, and by 2019, just before the Covid pandemic, there were 16.1 million overnight tourists, official figures show.

And then the latest backlash. It’s unclear whether last year’s protests had a direct impact, but 15.5 million tourists stayed overnight in Barcelona in 2024 — 100,000 less than in 2023, official figures show. The city’s population had increased to 1.7 million.

Some tourists spend only the day in the city. Among them, 1.6 million cruise ship passengers “in transit” in 2024, the Port of Barcelona reported. The majority come ashore when their ships dock in the morning, tour the city, and return by late afternoon to sail for the next destination, the tourism consortium press office said.

The resulting crowds, at places like La Rambla street and in the adjacent Gothic quarter, the oldest part of town, are partly to blame for the ire among Barcelona’s residents.

“We feel quite invaded,” Joan Albert Riu Fortuny, a lifelong Barcelona resident, told CNN.

‘There’s a limit’

One focal point of crowding, said Jordi Valls, a Barcelona deputy mayor whose portfolio includes tourism, is the neighborhood around the iconic Sagrada Familia Basilica. It’s home to 50,000 residents, he said, but in summer, another 50,000 tourists can show up daily there, just to look at the still-unfinished church.

“We think tourist demand is unstoppable,” Valls told CNN. “Everyone is welcome. But there’s a limit,” he said, without specifying the number. “The only possibility is to control the supply.”

A plan to double the tourist tax — up to more than $16 (15 euros) per tourist per night in Barcelona — was unveiled in February by the Catalan regional government. If approved, it would earmark at least 25% of the revenue to help ease a housing shortage, which is a prime complaint among residents.

Short-term tourist rental apartments are widely blamed as a factor in reducing affordable housing in Barcelona. The average price of long-term rental apartments, where residents live, increased 68% in the past decade, the city’s housing office told CNN.

“With tourist apartments, the owner gets much more money by renting it that way than in a long-term lease,” said Riu Fortuny, the Barcelona resident. “There’s not enough available housing.”

In all, Barcelona has 152,000 beds available nightly for visitors, the tourism consortium’s Hernández added, mainly in hotels but also including 60,000 in tourist apartments.

With such a potent industry, the proposed doubling of the tourist tax “does nothing more than legitimize the very touristic activity,” Daniel Pardo, a longtime member of the Assembly of Neighborhoods for Tourism Degrowth, in Barcelona, told CNN. “It’s an isolated measure that doesn’t change the status quo.”

The Assembly helped organize the large tourism protest last July — but not the water pistol part of it, Pardo said. He added that there will “surely” be more protests this year, but that specific plans would be decided later.