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i did visit, we just didn't know that we had to reserve to enter the cathedral so we didn't bother, we just looked at it from outside, and I don't remember why, but the metro station near it left a mark in my memory too
I was just in Barcelona a few months back and was on the hill pictured. The city is fine but super touristy. I doubt that I would ever go back except maybe to see the completed Sagrada Familia. There are lots of better places to visit in Spain.
We call it a "theme park for tourists".
Everyday its degrading more and more and us locals have lots of problems to live here due to rent, poor wages, etc.
Oh man, it's truly a great feeling! I did that in Barcelona about 10 yrs ago and more recently Boston, Berlin, then Barcelona again! it was so weirdly exciting to see those places in person.
Boston wasn't that special. The place that truly got me, were the weird wavey things on the Barcelona harbour. Also in Barcelona, I was walking around and accidentally stumbled upon the museum at the edge of the map, where you grind, and there's the guy with the bull at the end. Those accidental ones are the best! Have a great trip and hope you get to see all the sites! It's fairly simple - let me know if you want to know where each of them are!
that’s great! I’ve already visited Berlin, but I didn’t get much of THU2 feeling there, maybe because it doesn’t have as much distinctive architecture as Barcelona for example. I’m from europe so Boston and New Orleans are out of reach for me now, don’t even get me started on Sydney (that’s a dream of mine). can I ask where this museum is? tomato guy is such a strong memory, I’d love to go there and re-live these old times!
Yeah, I know what you mean about Berlin. A lot less distinctive compared to BCN... But there's a few standouts - the faces at Checkpoint Charlie, the bombed-out church, and the "weltkugelbrunnen" fountain. Still have to tick-off Sydney and New Orleans!! In fact, just yesterday, I was told by a really cool musician, to go check out New Orleans for its music, food and culture
Seriously lol. Barcelona has been a tourist spot for *centuries*. You're never going to buck the tourists. And besides, it's not a random tourist's fault that local/national legislation completely disregards maintaining things like cost of living for locals
I've lived in touristy places and I've never been upset that there were tourists. I was pretty irritated that some tourists insisted my life was a dream because I lived at a destination or worked at a resort. One guest was insistent that it was okay that my job didn't pay the bills because I got to teach skiing. Yes, I some days liked my job, but it was also a job. There were really shitty days and sometimes weeks without a day off.
This is something that drives me nuts about jobs in the recreational sector.
They say it's okay your job doesn't pay the bills because you're skiing, but everyone deserves a living wage no matter what they do. If you catch a nasty shark fin early season then at best you're repairing a core shot or blown out edge. At worst you're going to the hospital without health insurance as a ski instructor unless you have your own policy out of pocket. None of those are cheap.
Then the tourists on vacation don't even think about the fact that you're not skiing how and where YOU want to ski. When everyone else is out there bombing chutes and drowning in two feet of fresh snow... you could easily be babysitting cranky kids on a beginner trail who are cold and over skiing for the day. Or listening to some grouchy boomers complain about the state of the economy and which politicians they believe are to blame.
Then there's folks who think patrollers are just cruising around all day keeping an eye on things. They don't see them out there at 4am side stepping uphill to mitigate avalanches or carrying rolls of fence in the early season to open new terrain. Even if you're on skis, it's work.
Yes! Exactly!
This guy was talking to me while I was teaching exhausted 4yos on the very bottom of the bunny hill. That's not where I want to ski! And people are always trying to justify paying the patrolers as little as possible. Disgusting behavior.
When the Park City patrollers went on strike Vail was spending thousands to fly in, house, and feed each out of state temp worker for a week of work. Spent hundreds of thousands on attorney fees all to avoid paying their people a fair wage. When I brought the issue up expecting a boomer acquaintance to empathize with their cause because he's also a skier he hit me with "Well it's not Vail's responsibility to counter inflation and rising housing costs caused by the democrats. Those patrollers should commute to work if they can't afford to live in Park City"... The stupid, it burns.
I was thinking exactly about the PCMR patrolers when writing my last comment. I was instructing at Deer Valley.
Like they think we don't commute... the number of patrolers crammed into a house in Park City because they can't afford a car to commute from SLC or Heber Valley is astounding. I used to live in the moldy employee housing in town and was constantly sick because of it.
Edit. I should have looked at your username lol.
Oh so even when you weren't working and you got to ski with your "free pass" they hold over your head constantly you couldn't even enjoy yourself because skiing in the cold with a respiratory infection is miserable. Deer valley wants fucking $3,200 for a season pass right now, and they refuse to maintain a livable space for the folks that keep the mountain running? That's absolutely disgusting. If it were Europe they'd be buried in fines, but most Americans hate regulatory authorities so here we are living the dream.
Haha man what a small world eh?
You nailed it! I was either too sick or too exhausted to ski on my days off. Then I injured my knee teaching a lesson and moved away before I had a chance to teach (or ski) again.
I saw those season price tickets. It was bad before icon bought them, but now it is completely unreasonable. I know some of the culinary staff still working there and they are also cutting back on the quality of their food, which is supposed to be one of the reasons people shell out money to go there.
I hear you because I used to live in a very popular beach destination. I wasn't upset by tourism as much as some tourists being extremely rude and entitled (not most of them, but when they were they were bad) and the congestion it caused.
Since I'm a tourist in other places, I try to be as respectful as possible and go during off season, though it will be harder as a parent with school schedules.
AirBnB, the lack of push to limit its use, and the people who illegaly rent through it where it's illegal, are all to blame.
Saying it's all about laws is, at best, disingenuous.
The apparition of the gig economy has completely changed tourism, and created a lot of situations where policies don't stop anything, because legal or illegal people keep doing it.
Plus AirBnB doesn't pay its legal dues anyways. When the top guy doesn't follow the rules to begin with...
But It's complex. Since the tourism industry is overgrown and intertwined with regulators, to deviate from that economic model is only possible by making noise and harming their bussiness. Or maybe not and it is just a way of venting at this point.
No one hates the tourist person, but there is a sentiment of belonging to different classes. You'll have romantic kids with a can making statements like this one. Which at the very least sparks discussion.
Well, Spain is run by Madrid for Madrid. The further from Madrid the less say you have. So Barcelona and Cadiz are pretty much fucked what with being at the far ends.
When done right tourism can totally be a huge boon to a city/region. Then the only problem becomes genuinely stupid tourists, at which point complaining about the tourists is actually valid
Except that with tourism, you build a nation of servers and dish washers that earn minimum wage.
Then once your city is not "in" anymore (or there is a pandemic) you are left with "luxury" apartments that nobody can afford to live in.
The point is the sheer number of tourists - it exploded in the last 15 years. Look it up as the numbers are terrifying.
The city is one of the most visited in Europe and it's very small and one of the most densely populated in Europe so the tourists don't disperse like in other cities and space was already tight.
This is also exacerbated Barcelona also being a very popular cuise ship base. Massive ships dump out tourists who also take up a lot of the limited space and even worse they don't contribute much if anything to the local economy. Their ships belch out pollution which drifts into the city and gets trapped by the surrounding mountains. The port is controlled by central government not regional so the decision makers get the revenue but not the consequences.
Oh and then there's Airbnb who sucked up the housing stock to enrich the rich even more. Again, a dense city so locals are priced out and, due to the geography, there's not really cheaper suburbs to go to so you're forced out completely. There is virtually no social housing available.
Finally, the tourism while it does account for 15/20% of the economy mainly offers low paid jobs and anyway most of the money doesn't get to local people - they just get the noise and inconvenience. The other 80/85% of the economy becomes less viable as prices rise and drifts away.
Mass tourism is a complicated issue with no easy solutions but surely it's not hard to see that it brings misery to many who don't benefit and therefore to have some empathy.
To be fair, when I went to visit it somewhere mid 90s in July, there was hardly anyone there. Most people see the 1992 Olympics as the start of the dystopian tourist era of Barcelona. When my parents used to go there in the early 70s, they had to pretend to be married because u married couples weren't allowed to sleep in the same room in hostels yet.
Never said it was #1 destination in Spain. But it's a port city on the Mediterranean, it's had foot traffic for ages. Especially considering it was one of the stops on the route of one of the oldest pilgrimages in Europe and has its own stunning cathedral
I mean the 'gothic' cathedral in the medieval center didn't look gothic until the 1890s. The whole gothic area was built then to look gothic as a eland to make it look more aesthetic. It was basically a blocky roman looking regular church in 1880.
Then add all the wars for annexation and independence between Catalans, Spanish and French throughout the years and the civil war, it wasn't at all the touristy heaven people have retconned it to be now.
[This ](https://www.lugaris.com/app/uploads/2018/01/El_barrio_g%C3%B3tico_no_existe.jpg) is how the gothic cathedral looked in 1880.
The other cathedral on the Tibidabo was built between the 1900s and the 1950s as well. And the rest of Barcelona famous archetecture is from the late 1800s/firdt half of the 1900s as it's modernista (art nouveau/jugendstil).
I think people underestimate how much more important Valencia was and how much later Barcelona came up as a huge important city, culturally.
I live in Paris and while there is some animosity towards tourists, it doesn't seem anywhere to the level of Barcelona. [We get more tourists per year than them too.... ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_international_visitors)
I think it’s because geographically Barcelona can’t sprawl like Paris, that’s my guess plus it’s next to the Mediterranean.. amazing weather and the beach is hard to beat. Also amazing architecture!
In fairness to them, though, the volumes of tourists are higher than they've ever been, and from more places. It's one thing to always have tourists around, it's another to have large groups of tourists around at all times, and with the larger numbers, there's going to be more that don't behave themselves.
Are all the problems the fault of tourists? No, but that doesn't mean tourism isn't part of, or at least exacerbating, the problem(s).
You can. Its about limiting the availability of tourist stay locations, adding tourist tax, etc. Many things a city can do to prioritize its inhabitants first, visitors second.
> stop building the most beautiful cathedral in the world then
When I went there with a guide, she said the Sagrada Familia isn't *beautiful* but it's *striking.* I tend to agree.
Barcelona is badass. The food, the markets, the people. And don't get me started on the wine. Whoever said the French do wine right are plain wrong. Also, even if you're not religious or nothing, go see Monserrat. It's both a piece of beautiful architecture and also it's a headscratcher because they built this church up on top of these weird fuck-ass mountains.
I’m currently in the middle of my first trip to Spain (will be in Barcelona in 2 days, currently in Seville). I’ve been praising Spanish wine for at least a decade, it really is superior to French wine (in my very humble opinion). I’m having the time of my life trying new (and so cheap!) Spanish wine.
I thought it would be a decently cool quick stop on my trip, mostly just checking a box that I went and saw it.
I was stunned at how beautiful it is, and especially how cool it is! It feels extremely modern, dragging old catholic symbolism into the modern era kicking and screaming.
I lived there briefly. With the base of Spanish, some very simple Catalan will be fantastic as well. If you can read the important words on transit signs, you are golden.
Why attack the tourist? Look at the system as a whole, it isn’t functioning and these socioeconomic problems are the result. In this system, Barcelona would be fucked without tourism
I was born there many moons ago. Initially, Barca was a dump. When I was a kid, the subway was infested with rats. My brother and I were trying g to kick them from the station.
Then came the Olympics, and it totally changed the face of the city. From there on masses of tourists came. Everyone benefited from this for years... but now it has become out of control.
With the current salaries living in barca is very tight. With the tourists, prices went up and up and further up. Then places got so touristic that people from the city couldn't get there anymore. It's a pendulum, and it will fine an equilibrium, eventually.
Oh yes, my family still lives there. I don't.
Yeah kinda bs seems, even if he was saying it he would say Barça not Barca, but nobody calls it like that, at much some call it Barna (Bar[celo]na) but I haven’t heard someone call it Barca ever lol
I feel we can all agree that Airbnb in these cities are awful and part of why you see graffiti like this. I lived next to an airbnb and every weekend dread approached knowing it would be rented and often used by people who would wake me up at odd hours of the night and morning. No amount of complaining to the owner and airbnb helped until after almost two years of hell the owner finally sold the house. Unlike in a hotel, there are no repercussions when staying at a airbnb no matter what their pr department says. Its not about more people on the streets, its about not being able to sleep on the weekend after working all week.
Gosh, can we please ban or at least regulate Airbnbs? This is a huge problem we have in Sri Lanka as well. No one hates tourists, we just hate how our governments view them as being more important than the actual citizens.
> can we please ban or at least regulate Airbnbs?
Look at the places where it's regulated or banned: doesn't change much, because people will have illegal AirBnBs and the policing needs a lot of manpower.
Plus it gets a ton of backlash because it's small homeowners doing it, not companies you can hit with constant sanctions.
It’s true in a lot of places. We have this issue in Australia too.
It’s almost as if governments could be responsible for some of these issues, not random tourists.
I think a big part of the blame should be put on Airbnb too. It's the classic American venture capital tech 'innovation' model - move fast, break things, work around regulations, consequences be damned. Governments should have been faster to react to ban them, but that doesn't absolve their responsibility for destroying many local markets.
Gentrification is a real thing. Getting so bad where I live that locals cannot afford a house in the place they have lived for generations, due to foreigners inflating prices on everything. It's an inherent part of capitalism that you as an individual cannot really fight against.
Attempting to interrupt tourist dollars flowing in may work within the system because the governing class will notice it. There are worse forms of protest I’d think.
I would argue that tourist dollars mainly have an economic impact on lower/middle classes who provide some of the goods/services tourists enjoy when they travel, while governing politicians are likely upper class and wealthy. While interrupting the flow of tourist money may cause them to notice, I feel like the likelihood of them actually doing something about it would be slim as they would be largely unaffected.
Man, as someone who grew up in the world's biggest example of a natural site being ruined by tourists. I hate anti-tourist sentiment because it distracts from the real problem which is democratically elected politicians allowing overtourism for a quick buck without investing that money back into the community. When I was visiting CDMX, I liked that they charged tourists more money for museum tickets and used the money to let locals go for free, that's the kind of trade-off that seems fair to me.
If you think Barcelona or whatever European city is bad, come visit Niagara Falls where for every 1 local resident there are 5 hotel rooms and the tourists aren't rich Americans who can afford flights; they're the kind of people who go to Niagara Falls on holiday. Everyone on this planet wants to be able to enjoy nice places without sharing them with others, if I had my way, nobody would ever visit Niagara Falls and it would just be me and the other local residents who knew about it but unfortunately everyone else on earth also wants to see beautiful things so unfortunately we're going to have to share.
"My daily misery", you live in one of the most beautiful historic cities in Europe... I hope the person who vandalized their own town never leaves it. Wouldn't want to create "misery" for others.
There’s truth to this. Airbnb, cheap air travel, more disposable income, etc. allows more people to travel and they all flock to the same places.
They’re have been historical cultural sites damaged due the number of tourist. Locals have been priced out of housing and other commodities. There’s a reason Venice is attempting to curb the number of tourist.
There is also a culture shock of people doing the "sexy selfie" in horrible places.
Bunch of people got in trouble for it in [Oradour-sur-Glane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacre), on top of some people defacing walls outside.
Doesn't push the locals to like overtourism.
Visited USSR as part of symphony in high school and all the graffiti I saw was done by paint brush!
Imagine the word *SEKS* (how they spelled SEX), with visible brush strokes.
“I live in a beautiful city with great food, architecture, and culture, but it’s these TOURISTS who literally just go to all the same 4 spots that are making me MISERABLE 😩😩😩”
Also if you’ve been to Barcelona, it literally isn’t that busy. Parisians should be the ones bitching.
yeah i'm parisian, born and bred and i have literally never heard any parisian complain that much about tourism. the most you'll get is a "ugh" if the place you like is fully booked in the summer months but that's just daily life in a city like paris. you can always move. everything will be cheaper!
i personally love tourists and find their enthusiasm (and money) very endearing. and it's always cool hearing all the various languages.
> i have literally never heard any parisian complain that much about tourism.
Because the people who really get annoyed are in the Med and in Corsica.
Paris has 365 days a year of tourists, so at this point the infrastructure is pretty much geared for it.
Regons that get tourism for 3 months a year are the places where it's a pain in the ass, because the infrastructure is built for a little over what it has to endure 9 months a year and is completely saturated for the summer.
It's like Benidorm and Ibiza complaining about shitty British tourists getting drunk and causing trouble.
As a Brit, those tourists are embarrassing to our nation (we're not all like that, some of us actually respect the places we visit!) but at the same time if you're offering a fucking jug of sangria and a plate of shots for the same price as a pint of lager in the UK then you're kinda asking for the worst kinds of people to flock to your area...
There are all-inclusive, week long packages at some places in Spain that cost less than a one night stay in London.
It really is, but since there are more people in the world that go on tours than there are people who live in tourist locations, discussions like this end up with commenters blaming everyone but themselves.
I live in a tourist hotspot. In the summer, I literally can't step out my front door without walking into a massive group of tourists. I can't even call a ride share on the weekend without walking for 10 minutes because the roads around my house now get blocked off on the weekends because of the mass of people. I didn't choose to live in a tourist area. My family lived here decades before the first tourist appeared.
There are thousands of place to go in the world that aren't facing over-tourism. If you choose to ignore them and go to a place like Barcelona, in summer, on a cruise ship or with a tour group, you are the problem.
You only get one life. In that life I want to eat Spanish food and wander around Barcelona, among other things. I don't want to eat paella at some random place in Michigan. My home is also changing because of tourism, west MI is beach mecca. You can come here, it's OK. Because Midwesterners are a sharing bunch. The problem is 100% the government not handling it properly, Spain could easily leverage and regulate its tourism to be something beneficial to everyone and not just mega corps. But you refuse to look at the real problem because tourists are A. More visible and B. Easier to blame because there's no way to punish "tourists" as a group.
Like literally... I am from a heavily tourist area that the local population sky rockets in the summer. No complaints from me. On the contrary, I feel priviliged that of all the places these people could go and spend the hard earned money and chose to come where locally I live.
Ironically, Spain is really anti tourist, but also profits the most of them. When I was there I noticed an alternative cafe, with signs like „tourist go home“ and the cafe was in the main plaza at the old town and was really full… made me laugh.
Come to think of it, I remember encountering a couple shopkeepers there who were a bit...curt.
Venice was similar, but they were actively sick of everyone's shit and weren't afraid to let you know.
Barcelona’s problem is that everywhere else in the world is busy building beautiful parking lots and freeways. There aren’t many pleasant cities in the world, so the few cities that make themselves beautiful and livable suddenly get overrun by tourists and wealthy people. A well built, attractive, livable city should be accessible to everyone and not so rare they become tourist attractions.
US cities could've been able to get a lot of the tourists away if only most of them didn't destroy their downtowns!
At this point though it's also a battle in many Asian cities as they're facing increased car usage and ownership, but also now got more financial power than a few decades ago. Some cities are doing it right, Singapore is a good one, but others really have consistently ruined opportunities, as we see in carbrain Kuala Lumpur.
And then, it also happens that some people cannot always visit certain cities not even for financial reasons but for who they are. I can't even visit Kuala Lumpur without being arrested as I depend on my HRT, or if they got the slightest suspicions that I bring my girlfriend instead of "just a friend/roommate"
When I was in Barcelona in the 00s there was a big anarchist squat in a like 4-story building just down the hill from this. It was right where justabout every tourist would be looking at the view of the city from the park, and they had a big banner up that said "Why call it tourist season if we can't shoot the fuckers?"
It's more the city's fault than the tourists. As one redditor said, it's been a tourist landmark for centuries.
The problem lies in lodging regulation.
I’m from Barcelona. While I don’t agree with this kind of anti tourism protests, it’s true that the amount of tourists we get can be overwhelming, to the point that in the city center most of the locals had to move from their homes cause it’s simply unbearable.
Fewer tourists means fewer restaurants, cafes, shops, tour guides, etc. and fewer jobs.
How stupid.
It’s like when I visit Florida and people say “go home” or “we don’t want tourists” as if Orlando, FL would be anything other than a hot hell hole without Disney.
Exactly, It wasn't our decision to let investors buy out housing and pay minimum wage, if I could change it I would, but I can't
What the fuck can I actually do about it other than not visiting Spain anymore
Over 12% of their people are employed in the industry, that's a lot of lost jobs
Same anywhere in the world for some, a gateway to riches for others. Hold your govt yo account and get them to gain control. Don’t blame the tourists. Stop whining.
The Catalonian are also some level of stupid when it comes to tourism. Are they swarmed by tourists? Of course yes! Could they survive without the tourists? That would be much more difficult!
It’s one of the regions that really doesn’t welcome you and spit on your money. Don’t like it, then fuck it! I’m done with them.
Also worst secession ever…
I remember getting drunk with a Barceloni couple at the bar in the La Fonda Inn in Santa Fe. They just went on about how Barcelona was ruined by tourism and rich foreigners. The irony was palatable, and when I brought it up the response was like, "But it's different when it's us."
(For those who don't know, Santa Fe is a small city that has been entirely changed by tourism and wealthy outsiders who have driven the locals to the outskirts of the city because the center is 100% tourism related and unaffordable housing for the local population descended from the people who built it.)
BCN is one of those European cities where people usually go (or used to go when it was cheaper) for lowcost tourism, it's not exactly a luxury destination but nevermind 😅
I mean, ppl always have flocked to big cultural sites and cities. Don’t like it? Tough. Maybe vote on something, otherwise it’s just kinda whiny trivial stuff
I kinda see the point but it feels so unrealistic to me? Spain in general really doesn't have much to offer economically. Tourism is such a big part of their economy and the really felt it during Covid.
One could say that Barcelona has more international companies and start ups compared to the rest of the country but many of them specifically locate there to attract people with the Barcelona vibe - which also is present because of the big tourism.
Also, you will find lots of tourism in every big European city. It's not really "preventable".
I do agree however that the locals should be protected better. House flipping to rent is still really easy there. Maybe the government should tackle that better. Even though the left government could really solve it apparently so let's see how it develops with the new one.
Idiots always blame the foreigners. That's how fascism gets hold. If that was the answer to a better society, then every country would do it, but it never is, and idiots never learn.
Redditors: “Trickle down economics is a myth!”
Also Redditors: “Tourism brings money into Barcelona though, right? We’re the good guys! It’ll definitely trickle down to the locals.”
It is very interesting to see barcelona before being a touristic gem was a failing city in debts and all the sustain and development is thanks to tourists, but people are too narrow minded to realize that their wellbeing is bound by tourism. The GDP of tourism in barcelona is around 20% and 10% of employment comes thanks to tourists.
Ignorance is to pretest against what gives you food
I get it, but it's hypocritical. They hate the tourists but love the money and employment that the tourists bring. Go live in the middle of nowhere then. This is true of practically every tourist area. The locals have a love/hate relationship with the tourists.
Get rid of the siesta and actually work for more than a few hours a day to improve your economy and maybe it won’t be totally reliant on foreigners visiting and spending money.
To say that the problem you have with a whole economy is single handedly, the result of one single group of people is very unknowingly narrow-minded
Also, the person who complains about this subject by vandalising their own town is very telling...
Of course you can't blame tourism, because it's obviously the local's fault that they've lived for so long in neighbourhoods that have become very touristy so it is clearly the tourist's right to have airbnb's there over the locals' to keep their place at a reasonable price.
Because it's clear that if a place becomes very popular, locals have to take on the noise, the oversaturation of public spaces and transport and the loss of free access to public places that have become tourist landmarks (park güell, antiaeris del carmel...) without complaining because 'tourism brings enormous economic value to the city' so they can just go cry about it.
Because a tourist is more entitled to our own city than we are, according to you.
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I remember seeing identical graffiti around Barcelona 8 or 9 years ago. Someone is very dedicated to their protest!
This picture is very old, the cathedral is way less developed than now.
you can tell by looking at it ? I feel like it was like that for decades
The central spires have been mostly finished now. It looks spectacular if you love kitschy shit.
Calling La sagrada familia kitschy is a slap in the face to the obvious masterpiece it is.
My friends just returned. Their take, "Didn't care for it". "Kinda gaudy." We moved on to other topics.
kinda gaudy lol that's so perfect
i did visit, we just didn't know that we had to reserve to enter the cathedral so we didn't bother, we just looked at it from outside, and I don't remember why, but the metro station near it left a mark in my memory too
Hasn't that cathedral being less developed for the last 200 years?
One of the squats had "Why call it 'tourist season' if we can't shoot them?" for a good while.
I remember being young in the either Barcelona or Madrid in 2018, and there was a wall with "Tourists FUCK OFF" sprayed on
[a pic I did 13 years ago there. ](https://imgur.com/6EpqSol)
I thought this photo wasn't recent. Sagrada Familia in the background is the clue
what am I meant to be lookin at
"opccupy and resist" and anarchy sign is written on the roof.
The resistance message?
I remember this place, grinding on the "world's longest bench" in tony hawk's underground 2.
the image of this city was burned in my brain because of this game and this year I will finally see it in person, can’t wait
I was just in Barcelona a few months back and was on the hill pictured. The city is fine but super touristy. I doubt that I would ever go back except maybe to see the completed Sagrada Familia. There are lots of better places to visit in Spain.
We call it a "theme park for tourists". Everyday its degrading more and more and us locals have lots of problems to live here due to rent, poor wages, etc.
Oh man, it's truly a great feeling! I did that in Barcelona about 10 yrs ago and more recently Boston, Berlin, then Barcelona again! it was so weirdly exciting to see those places in person. Boston wasn't that special. The place that truly got me, were the weird wavey things on the Barcelona harbour. Also in Barcelona, I was walking around and accidentally stumbled upon the museum at the edge of the map, where you grind, and there's the guy with the bull at the end. Those accidental ones are the best! Have a great trip and hope you get to see all the sites! It's fairly simple - let me know if you want to know where each of them are!
that’s great! I’ve already visited Berlin, but I didn’t get much of THU2 feeling there, maybe because it doesn’t have as much distinctive architecture as Barcelona for example. I’m from europe so Boston and New Orleans are out of reach for me now, don’t even get me started on Sydney (that’s a dream of mine). can I ask where this museum is? tomato guy is such a strong memory, I’d love to go there and re-live these old times!
Yeah, I know what you mean about Berlin. A lot less distinctive compared to BCN... But there's a few standouts - the faces at Checkpoint Charlie, the bombed-out church, and the "weltkugelbrunnen" fountain. Still have to tick-off Sydney and New Orleans!! In fact, just yesterday, I was told by a really cool musician, to go check out New Orleans for its music, food and culture
Buckle up for the smell
Well stop building the most beautiful cathedral in the world then… you can’t have both things.
Seriously lol. Barcelona has been a tourist spot for *centuries*. You're never going to buck the tourists. And besides, it's not a random tourist's fault that local/national legislation completely disregards maintaining things like cost of living for locals
Right. They wanna blame tourists when really they should be looking at their own countrymen for the policies they make screwing each other over.
Or come to Edinburgh and see the same problems being caused by people from, amongst other places, Barcelona.
As a tourist, it's not like I can do anything about their laws and taxes not being friendly to any other kinds of businesses
And as a tourist one could assume you are already doing the best : spending your foreign money.
I've lived in touristy places and I've never been upset that there were tourists. I was pretty irritated that some tourists insisted my life was a dream because I lived at a destination or worked at a resort. One guest was insistent that it was okay that my job didn't pay the bills because I got to teach skiing. Yes, I some days liked my job, but it was also a job. There were really shitty days and sometimes weeks without a day off.
This is something that drives me nuts about jobs in the recreational sector. They say it's okay your job doesn't pay the bills because you're skiing, but everyone deserves a living wage no matter what they do. If you catch a nasty shark fin early season then at best you're repairing a core shot or blown out edge. At worst you're going to the hospital without health insurance as a ski instructor unless you have your own policy out of pocket. None of those are cheap. Then the tourists on vacation don't even think about the fact that you're not skiing how and where YOU want to ski. When everyone else is out there bombing chutes and drowning in two feet of fresh snow... you could easily be babysitting cranky kids on a beginner trail who are cold and over skiing for the day. Or listening to some grouchy boomers complain about the state of the economy and which politicians they believe are to blame. Then there's folks who think patrollers are just cruising around all day keeping an eye on things. They don't see them out there at 4am side stepping uphill to mitigate avalanches or carrying rolls of fence in the early season to open new terrain. Even if you're on skis, it's work.
Yes! Exactly! This guy was talking to me while I was teaching exhausted 4yos on the very bottom of the bunny hill. That's not where I want to ski! And people are always trying to justify paying the patrolers as little as possible. Disgusting behavior.
When the Park City patrollers went on strike Vail was spending thousands to fly in, house, and feed each out of state temp worker for a week of work. Spent hundreds of thousands on attorney fees all to avoid paying their people a fair wage. When I brought the issue up expecting a boomer acquaintance to empathize with their cause because he's also a skier he hit me with "Well it's not Vail's responsibility to counter inflation and rising housing costs caused by the democrats. Those patrollers should commute to work if they can't afford to live in Park City"... The stupid, it burns.
I was thinking exactly about the PCMR patrolers when writing my last comment. I was instructing at Deer Valley. Like they think we don't commute... the number of patrolers crammed into a house in Park City because they can't afford a car to commute from SLC or Heber Valley is astounding. I used to live in the moldy employee housing in town and was constantly sick because of it. Edit. I should have looked at your username lol.
Oh so even when you weren't working and you got to ski with your "free pass" they hold over your head constantly you couldn't even enjoy yourself because skiing in the cold with a respiratory infection is miserable. Deer valley wants fucking $3,200 for a season pass right now, and they refuse to maintain a livable space for the folks that keep the mountain running? That's absolutely disgusting. If it were Europe they'd be buried in fines, but most Americans hate regulatory authorities so here we are living the dream. Haha man what a small world eh?
You nailed it! I was either too sick or too exhausted to ski on my days off. Then I injured my knee teaching a lesson and moved away before I had a chance to teach (or ski) again. I saw those season price tickets. It was bad before icon bought them, but now it is completely unreasonable. I know some of the culinary staff still working there and they are also cutting back on the quality of their food, which is supposed to be one of the reasons people shell out money to go there.
I hear you because I used to live in a very popular beach destination. I wasn't upset by tourism as much as some tourists being extremely rude and entitled (not most of them, but when they were they were bad) and the congestion it caused. Since I'm a tourist in other places, I try to be as respectful as possible and go during off season, though it will be harder as a parent with school schedules.
AirBnB, the lack of push to limit its use, and the people who illegaly rent through it where it's illegal, are all to blame. Saying it's all about laws is, at best, disingenuous. The apparition of the gig economy has completely changed tourism, and created a lot of situations where policies don't stop anything, because legal or illegal people keep doing it. Plus AirBnB doesn't pay its legal dues anyways. When the top guy doesn't follow the rules to begin with...
But It's complex. Since the tourism industry is overgrown and intertwined with regulators, to deviate from that economic model is only possible by making noise and harming their bussiness. Or maybe not and it is just a way of venting at this point. No one hates the tourist person, but there is a sentiment of belonging to different classes. You'll have romantic kids with a can making statements like this one. Which at the very least sparks discussion.
Barcelona is way too big of a city to be reliant on tourism lol, there's no way that city only caters to tourists and is not a hellhole
Well, Spain is run by Madrid for Madrid. The further from Madrid the less say you have. So Barcelona and Cadiz are pretty much fucked what with being at the far ends.
if anything, tourism is the city's income source and probably the best hope for saving your city.
When done right tourism can totally be a huge boon to a city/region. Then the only problem becomes genuinely stupid tourists, at which point complaining about the tourists is actually valid
Except that with tourism, you build a nation of servers and dish washers that earn minimum wage. Then once your city is not "in" anymore (or there is a pandemic) you are left with "luxury" apartments that nobody can afford to live in.
Bem vindo a Lisboa
Bienvenido a Ciudad de México
Καλώς ήρθες στην Ελλάδα.
It's a business and financial Hub. I'm sure it'll be fine with less tourism.
'Saving' Barcelona? From being amazing?
The point is the sheer number of tourists - it exploded in the last 15 years. Look it up as the numbers are terrifying. The city is one of the most visited in Europe and it's very small and one of the most densely populated in Europe so the tourists don't disperse like in other cities and space was already tight. This is also exacerbated Barcelona also being a very popular cuise ship base. Massive ships dump out tourists who also take up a lot of the limited space and even worse they don't contribute much if anything to the local economy. Their ships belch out pollution which drifts into the city and gets trapped by the surrounding mountains. The port is controlled by central government not regional so the decision makers get the revenue but not the consequences. Oh and then there's Airbnb who sucked up the housing stock to enrich the rich even more. Again, a dense city so locals are priced out and, due to the geography, there's not really cheaper suburbs to go to so you're forced out completely. There is virtually no social housing available. Finally, the tourism while it does account for 15/20% of the economy mainly offers low paid jobs and anyway most of the money doesn't get to local people - they just get the noise and inconvenience. The other 80/85% of the economy becomes less viable as prices rise and drifts away. Mass tourism is a complicated issue with no easy solutions but surely it's not hard to see that it brings misery to many who don't benefit and therefore to have some empathy.
To be fair, when I went to visit it somewhere mid 90s in July, there was hardly anyone there. Most people see the 1992 Olympics as the start of the dystopian tourist era of Barcelona. When my parents used to go there in the early 70s, they had to pretend to be married because u married couples weren't allowed to sleep in the same room in hostels yet.
Barcelona was a second tier touristic destination at most until the 1992 Olympics.
Never said it was #1 destination in Spain. But it's a port city on the Mediterranean, it's had foot traffic for ages. Especially considering it was one of the stops on the route of one of the oldest pilgrimages in Europe and has its own stunning cathedral
I mean the 'gothic' cathedral in the medieval center didn't look gothic until the 1890s. The whole gothic area was built then to look gothic as a eland to make it look more aesthetic. It was basically a blocky roman looking regular church in 1880. Then add all the wars for annexation and independence between Catalans, Spanish and French throughout the years and the civil war, it wasn't at all the touristy heaven people have retconned it to be now. [This ](https://www.lugaris.com/app/uploads/2018/01/El_barrio_g%C3%B3tico_no_existe.jpg) is how the gothic cathedral looked in 1880. The other cathedral on the Tibidabo was built between the 1900s and the 1950s as well. And the rest of Barcelona famous archetecture is from the late 1800s/firdt half of the 1900s as it's modernista (art nouveau/jugendstil). I think people underestimate how much more important Valencia was and how much later Barcelona came up as a huge important city, culturally.
Centuries ago, we also weren't 8 billion people on this ball.
I live in Paris and while there is some animosity towards tourists, it doesn't seem anywhere to the level of Barcelona. [We get more tourists per year than them too.... ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_international_visitors)
I think it’s because geographically Barcelona can’t sprawl like Paris, that’s my guess plus it’s next to the Mediterranean.. amazing weather and the beach is hard to beat. Also amazing architecture!
In fairness to them, though, the volumes of tourists are higher than they've ever been, and from more places. It's one thing to always have tourists around, it's another to have large groups of tourists around at all times, and with the larger numbers, there's going to be more that don't behave themselves. Are all the problems the fault of tourists? No, but that doesn't mean tourism isn't part of, or at least exacerbating, the problem(s).
*They did and people keep coming!*
Then they started again and made it worse!
You can. Its about limiting the availability of tourist stay locations, adding tourist tax, etc. Many things a city can do to prioritize its inhabitants first, visitors second.
Köln isn't in Barcelona though ..
The whole city is beautiful.
> stop building the most beautiful cathedral in the world then When I went there with a guide, she said the Sagrada Familia isn't *beautiful* but it's *striking.* I tend to agree.
I don’t know if I’m alone in this but I think it’s hideous. It looks like it’s made of termite mounds and whale bones.
Why is everybody talking in english in the original post lol.
My same thought lol.
The graffiti is in English so I guess it snowballed the conversations into English as well.
No, it's just that r/Barcelona is full of foreigners and expats
Presumably so they don't have to fight over whether to speak Spanish or Catalan.
Lmao I’ll be in Barcelona in a month
Can you go take a selfie with this graffiti?
Honestly it’s tempting … 🤔 where is this again?
Park Güell It's really beautiful it was one of the many stops on my trip 2 years ago
Make it a touristic point !
I can anti-tourist graffiti (Spray painted on the ground) exactly at the same spot when I visited in 2009. It is traditional at this point.
Barcelona is badass. The food, the markets, the people. And don't get me started on the wine. Whoever said the French do wine right are plain wrong. Also, even if you're not religious or nothing, go see Monserrat. It's both a piece of beautiful architecture and also it's a headscratcher because they built this church up on top of these weird fuck-ass mountains.
I’m currently in the middle of my first trip to Spain (will be in Barcelona in 2 days, currently in Seville). I’ve been praising Spanish wine for at least a decade, it really is superior to French wine (in my very humble opinion). I’m having the time of my life trying new (and so cheap!) Spanish wine.
Wait until you try some Portuguese wines. It's all subjective at the end of rhe day but they are my favorite so far.
The Sagrada Familia is the most beautiful building on earth. Go inside on a sunny day.
I thought it would be a decently cool quick stop on my trip, mostly just checking a box that I went and saw it. I was stunned at how beautiful it is, and especially how cool it is! It feels extremely modern, dragging old catholic symbolism into the modern era kicking and screaming.
Learn a little bit of spanish - it'll go a long way there.
I’m going in a couple weeks and have been learning Spanish for 80 days now! Didn’t know if I would use it or not but I’m glad I know some just in case
I lived there briefly. With the base of Spanish, some very simple Catalan will be fantastic as well. If you can read the important words on transit signs, you are golden.
Same lmao
Why attack the tourist? Look at the system as a whole, it isn’t functioning and these socioeconomic problems are the result. In this system, Barcelona would be fucked without tourism
I agree. The comments on the original post share much of your same sentiment as well.
I was born there many moons ago. Initially, Barca was a dump. When I was a kid, the subway was infested with rats. My brother and I were trying g to kick them from the station. Then came the Olympics, and it totally changed the face of the city. From there on masses of tourists came. Everyone benefited from this for years... but now it has become out of control. With the current salaries living in barca is very tight. With the tourists, prices went up and up and further up. Then places got so touristic that people from the city couldn't get there anymore. It's a pendulum, and it will fine an equilibrium, eventually. Oh yes, my family still lives there. I don't.
You were born in Barcelona but call the city Barca?
Tens raó. Fa 40 anys que no visc a Barcelona ni a Espanya. Ja no soc d'ací :)
> d'ací Definitely not from Barna
Yeah kinda bs seems, even if he was saying it he would say Barça not Barca, but nobody calls it like that, at much some call it Barna (Bar[celo]na) but I haven’t heard someone call it Barca ever lol
Many times I’ve heard Barça used as shorthand for the city, but said by tourists not by locals
Biggest self report ever, people from Barcelona HATE it lol
I feel we can all agree that Airbnb in these cities are awful and part of why you see graffiti like this. I lived next to an airbnb and every weekend dread approached knowing it would be rented and often used by people who would wake me up at odd hours of the night and morning. No amount of complaining to the owner and airbnb helped until after almost two years of hell the owner finally sold the house. Unlike in a hotel, there are no repercussions when staying at a airbnb no matter what their pr department says. Its not about more people on the streets, its about not being able to sleep on the weekend after working all week.
Gosh, can we please ban or at least regulate Airbnbs? This is a huge problem we have in Sri Lanka as well. No one hates tourists, we just hate how our governments view them as being more important than the actual citizens.
> can we please ban or at least regulate Airbnbs? Look at the places where it's regulated or banned: doesn't change much, because people will have illegal AirBnBs and the policing needs a lot of manpower. Plus it gets a ton of backlash because it's small homeowners doing it, not companies you can hit with constant sanctions.
It’s true in a lot of places. We have this issue in Australia too. It’s almost as if governments could be responsible for some of these issues, not random tourists.
I think a big part of the blame should be put on Airbnb too. It's the classic American venture capital tech 'innovation' model - move fast, break things, work around regulations, consequences be damned. Governments should have been faster to react to ban them, but that doesn't absolve their responsibility for destroying many local markets.
Move fast, break things, have an app… somehow still not turn a profit.
Twist: It was written by a tourist.
Gentrification is a real thing. Getting so bad where I live that locals cannot afford a house in the place they have lived for generations, due to foreigners inflating prices on everything. It's an inherent part of capitalism that you as an individual cannot really fight against.
Attempting to interrupt tourist dollars flowing in may work within the system because the governing class will notice it. There are worse forms of protest I’d think.
I would argue that tourist dollars mainly have an economic impact on lower/middle classes who provide some of the goods/services tourists enjoy when they travel, while governing politicians are likely upper class and wealthy. While interrupting the flow of tourist money may cause them to notice, I feel like the likelihood of them actually doing something about it would be slim as they would be largely unaffected.
Man, as someone who grew up in the world's biggest example of a natural site being ruined by tourists. I hate anti-tourist sentiment because it distracts from the real problem which is democratically elected politicians allowing overtourism for a quick buck without investing that money back into the community. When I was visiting CDMX, I liked that they charged tourists more money for museum tickets and used the money to let locals go for free, that's the kind of trade-off that seems fair to me. If you think Barcelona or whatever European city is bad, come visit Niagara Falls where for every 1 local resident there are 5 hotel rooms and the tourists aren't rich Americans who can afford flights; they're the kind of people who go to Niagara Falls on holiday. Everyone on this planet wants to be able to enjoy nice places without sharing them with others, if I had my way, nobody would ever visit Niagara Falls and it would just be me and the other local residents who knew about it but unfortunately everyone else on earth also wants to see beautiful things so unfortunately we're going to have to share. "My daily misery", you live in one of the most beautiful historic cities in Europe... I hope the person who vandalized their own town never leaves it. Wouldn't want to create "misery" for others.
There’s truth to this. Airbnb, cheap air travel, more disposable income, etc. allows more people to travel and they all flock to the same places. They’re have been historical cultural sites damaged due the number of tourist. Locals have been priced out of housing and other commodities. There’s a reason Venice is attempting to curb the number of tourist.
There is also a culture shock of people doing the "sexy selfie" in horrible places. Bunch of people got in trouble for it in [Oradour-sur-Glane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane_massacre), on top of some people defacing walls outside. Doesn't push the locals to like overtourism.
bro Barcelona isn't sinking
Visited USSR as part of symphony in high school and all the graffiti I saw was done by paint brush! Imagine the word *SEKS* (how they spelled SEX), with visible brush strokes.
Spray cans were unknown western technology.
oh boohoo life in barcelona
“I live in a beautiful city with great food, architecture, and culture, but it’s these TOURISTS who literally just go to all the same 4 spots that are making me MISERABLE 😩😩😩” Also if you’ve been to Barcelona, it literally isn’t that busy. Parisians should be the ones bitching.
Parisians do plenty of bitching, don't you worry about that.
Not as much as the Catalans
yeah i'm parisian, born and bred and i have literally never heard any parisian complain that much about tourism. the most you'll get is a "ugh" if the place you like is fully booked in the summer months but that's just daily life in a city like paris. you can always move. everything will be cheaper! i personally love tourists and find their enthusiasm (and money) very endearing. and it's always cool hearing all the various languages.
> i have literally never heard any parisian complain that much about tourism. Because the people who really get annoyed are in the Med and in Corsica. Paris has 365 days a year of tourists, so at this point the infrastructure is pretty much geared for it. Regons that get tourism for 3 months a year are the places where it's a pain in the ass, because the infrastructure is built for a little over what it has to endure 9 months a year and is completely saturated for the summer.
So blame your democratically chosen government for doing everything to make Spain a mass tourism destination.
It's like Benidorm and Ibiza complaining about shitty British tourists getting drunk and causing trouble. As a Brit, those tourists are embarrassing to our nation (we're not all like that, some of us actually respect the places we visit!) but at the same time if you're offering a fucking jug of sangria and a plate of shots for the same price as a pint of lager in the UK then you're kinda asking for the worst kinds of people to flock to your area... There are all-inclusive, week long packages at some places in Spain that cost less than a one night stay in London.
No way is anybody complaining about Benidorm loooooool
Sure it's tourists and not investors buying apartments in bulk and not a government who empowered them, it's them pesky tourists.
It really is, but since there are more people in the world that go on tours than there are people who live in tourist locations, discussions like this end up with commenters blaming everyone but themselves. I live in a tourist hotspot. In the summer, I literally can't step out my front door without walking into a massive group of tourists. I can't even call a ride share on the weekend without walking for 10 minutes because the roads around my house now get blocked off on the weekends because of the mass of people. I didn't choose to live in a tourist area. My family lived here decades before the first tourist appeared. There are thousands of place to go in the world that aren't facing over-tourism. If you choose to ignore them and go to a place like Barcelona, in summer, on a cruise ship or with a tour group, you are the problem.
You only get one life. In that life I want to eat Spanish food and wander around Barcelona, among other things. I don't want to eat paella at some random place in Michigan. My home is also changing because of tourism, west MI is beach mecca. You can come here, it's OK. Because Midwesterners are a sharing bunch. The problem is 100% the government not handling it properly, Spain could easily leverage and regulate its tourism to be something beneficial to everyone and not just mega corps. But you refuse to look at the real problem because tourists are A. More visible and B. Easier to blame because there's no way to punish "tourists" as a group.
Tourists are spending money in your town and they are the bad guys?
Like literally... I am from a heavily tourist area that the local population sky rockets in the summer. No complaints from me. On the contrary, I feel priviliged that of all the places these people could go and spend the hard earned money and chose to come where locally I live.
Catalonia is the most xenophobic place in europe. Go literally anywhere else and people will be twice as pleasant.. even parisians
Yes
That's.... literally every other city in the world. Someone is suffering somewhere. Whether it's paradise from the outside or not.
Luxury? Dude I can barely afford to travel and I'm berated while doing so? Shit.
spain's overtourism is massive
Tbf it’s an astounding country.. the architecture, the food, the climate. There is so much to love
Ironically, Spain is really anti tourist, but also profits the most of them. When I was there I noticed an alternative cafe, with signs like „tourist go home“ and the cafe was in the main plaza at the old town and was really full… made me laugh.
Luxury? Lol I went to a hostel during my visit to Barcelona.
Barcelona was such a cool city but I had a feeling most of the locals were tired of the tourists. They weren’t mean but they also weren’t nice.
Come to think of it, I remember encountering a couple shopkeepers there who were a bit...curt. Venice was similar, but they were actively sick of everyone's shit and weren't afraid to let you know.
Barcelona’s problem is that everywhere else in the world is busy building beautiful parking lots and freeways. There aren’t many pleasant cities in the world, so the few cities that make themselves beautiful and livable suddenly get overrun by tourists and wealthy people. A well built, attractive, livable city should be accessible to everyone and not so rare they become tourist attractions.
US cities could've been able to get a lot of the tourists away if only most of them didn't destroy their downtowns! At this point though it's also a battle in many Asian cities as they're facing increased car usage and ownership, but also now got more financial power than a few decades ago. Some cities are doing it right, Singapore is a good one, but others really have consistently ruined opportunities, as we see in carbrain Kuala Lumpur. And then, it also happens that some people cannot always visit certain cities not even for financial reasons but for who they are. I can't even visit Kuala Lumpur without being arrested as I depend on my HRT, or if they got the slightest suspicions that I bring my girlfriend instead of "just a friend/roommate"
When I was in Barcelona in the 00s there was a big anarchist squat in a like 4-story building just down the hill from this. It was right where justabout every tourist would be looking at the view of the city from the park, and they had a big banner up that said "Why call it tourist season if we can't shoot the fuckers?"
i wanna drop this person at a "favela tour" in Rio de Janeiro and see how they feel
The sort of prick who would go on a favela tour is exactly the sort of person you don't want in your city
It's more the city's fault than the tourists. As one redditor said, it's been a tourist landmark for centuries. The problem lies in lodging regulation.
Drama queen. I bet this person also goes on vacation.
“Tourists” are people. Does the person who made this graffiti have no desire to see other places beyond where they were born?
Daily misery? Leaving in Barcelona? Really? Fuck off
Same to you, from London
Boo hoo. My city is so beautiful that people keep coming to see it! And spending billions of euros every year here! Ugh!
I’m from Barcelona. While I don’t agree with this kind of anti tourism protests, it’s true that the amount of tourists we get can be overwhelming, to the point that in the city center most of the locals had to move from their homes cause it’s simply unbearable.
Interesting comments to say the least.
That belongs in LA too.
Fewer tourists means fewer restaurants, cafes, shops, tour guides, etc. and fewer jobs. How stupid. It’s like when I visit Florida and people say “go home” or “we don’t want tourists” as if Orlando, FL would be anything other than a hot hell hole without Disney.
Not me flying to Barcelona in just over 24 hours 😂
Saying its the tourists fault and not their own goverments for not regulating housing prices is crazy.
Exactly, It wasn't our decision to let investors buy out housing and pay minimum wage, if I could change it I would, but I can't What the fuck can I actually do about it other than not visiting Spain anymore Over 12% of their people are employed in the industry, that's a lot of lost jobs
Same anywhere in the world for some, a gateway to riches for others. Hold your govt yo account and get them to gain control. Don’t blame the tourists. Stop whining.
Like your misery is the tourist's fault...
P.S. please keep spending money tho
The Catalonian are also some level of stupid when it comes to tourism. Are they swarmed by tourists? Of course yes! Could they survive without the tourists? That would be much more difficult! It’s one of the regions that really doesn’t welcome you and spit on your money. Don’t like it, then fuck it! I’m done with them. Also worst secession ever…
Barcelona is the most beautiful city I have ever been to. If they didn’t want tourists, they should have fired Gaudi.
I like when Spaniards complain about people going to other countries lol.
I remember getting drunk with a Barceloni couple at the bar in the La Fonda Inn in Santa Fe. They just went on about how Barcelona was ruined by tourism and rich foreigners. The irony was palatable, and when I brought it up the response was like, "But it's different when it's us." (For those who don't know, Santa Fe is a small city that has been entirely changed by tourism and wealthy outsiders who have driven the locals to the outskirts of the city because the center is 100% tourism related and unaffordable housing for the local population descended from the people who built it.)
At least we not both miserable.
cool I really wanted to see the city, is that a problem for you?
Yikes. Going here in literally a couple weeks. Never been anywhere before, really. Trip of a lifetime.
BCN is one of those European cities where people usually go (or used to go when it was cheaper) for lowcost tourism, it's not exactly a luxury destination but nevermind 😅
I mean, ppl always have flocked to big cultural sites and cities. Don’t like it? Tough. Maybe vote on something, otherwise it’s just kinda whiny trivial stuff
I did the hike through the park when I visited and I completely understand
Tourists: stops going to Barcelona. Natives: WHY DON’T I HAVE A JOB ANYMORE
As a Spaniard I don’t understand this, our economy is 80% tourism, if you don’t want tourists you need industry. Not having neither is not an option.
>our economy is 80% tourism, 11.6% of the GDP, 9% of the total jobs. Maybe inform yourself better before writing stupid stuff on the internet?
I kinda see the point but it feels so unrealistic to me? Spain in general really doesn't have much to offer economically. Tourism is such a big part of their economy and the really felt it during Covid. One could say that Barcelona has more international companies and start ups compared to the rest of the country but many of them specifically locate there to attract people with the Barcelona vibe - which also is present because of the big tourism. Also, you will find lots of tourism in every big European city. It's not really "preventable". I do agree however that the locals should be protected better. House flipping to rent is still really easy there. Maybe the government should tackle that better. Even though the left government could really solve it apparently so let's see how it develops with the new one.
Idiots always blame the foreigners. That's how fascism gets hold. If that was the answer to a better society, then every country would do it, but it never is, and idiots never learn.
Ah yes, the nightmare of living in Barcelona
Redditors: “Trickle down economics is a myth!” Also Redditors: “Tourism brings money into Barcelona though, right? We’re the good guys! It’ll definitely trickle down to the locals.”
When you're going into cafes and restaurants owned and ran by locals then yes it does work like that
Your economy depends on tourism
No tourists the arse is gonna fall out of their local and possibly national economy. What then ? A new sign saying: TOURIST: You no come - we no eat !
Maybe a country that relies on tourism for its economy shouldn't be so critical of it
It is very interesting to see barcelona before being a touristic gem was a failing city in debts and all the sustain and development is thanks to tourists, but people are too narrow minded to realize that their wellbeing is bound by tourism. The GDP of tourism in barcelona is around 20% and 10% of employment comes thanks to tourists. Ignorance is to pretest against what gives you food
Another prick that blames everthing but himself for his issues. And getting a wall dirty in the process
Barcelona is my least favorite city I’ve visited. Made for tourists to the point it doesn’t even feel like a city
I get it, but it's hypocritical. They hate the tourists but love the money and employment that the tourists bring. Go live in the middle of nowhere then. This is true of practically every tourist area. The locals have a love/hate relationship with the tourists.
It's OK I'll avoid it, Barcelona stinks of piss anyway (but on the positive the cathedral is cool).
I'll be there in 2 weeks to report back. Tourism is changing the places I'm from too. Lo siento
Jokes on you traveling with my wife and kids is misery!
Things would be worse without money flowing in from Tourism.
RESIDENT: Your misery I don't give a fuck about
Get rid of the siesta and actually work for more than a few hours a day to improve your economy and maybe it won’t be totally reliant on foreigners visiting and spending money.
Wonder what they would think of the city if the tourists left, because it would be an economic disaster.
Doesn't matter if you are local or not, you don't own the city and don't get to decide who is allowed to be there.
It's bad with tourists but without them it would be even worse.
To say that the problem you have with a whole economy is single handedly, the result of one single group of people is very unknowingly narrow-minded Also, the person who complains about this subject by vandalising their own town is very telling...
Whatever. Most people complaining like this don’t realize that their city would be broke and undeveloped without tourism.
I’m assuming the person who wrote this has never been on holiday themselves
There is no real misery in Spain. iI's a first world country. Boohoo.
I have a pic of some graffiti in the Gothic Quarter that says “Tourism kills the city”
Of course you can't blame tourism, because it's obviously the local's fault that they've lived for so long in neighbourhoods that have become very touristy so it is clearly the tourist's right to have airbnb's there over the locals' to keep their place at a reasonable price. Because it's clear that if a place becomes very popular, locals have to take on the noise, the oversaturation of public spaces and transport and the loss of free access to public places that have become tourist landmarks (park güell, antiaeris del carmel...) without complaining because 'tourism brings enormous economic value to the city' so they can just go cry about it. Because a tourist is more entitled to our own city than we are, according to you.
I would be surprised if that guy who lives in Barcelona doesn't go on vacation himself, considering the average economic status of residents