We are in the middle of summer season and Barcelona is on its way to breaking its historical record for tourists. Although they will presumably get rich, those responsible for the sector (hoteliers, restaurateurs, transport...) are not letting themselves be carried away by euphoria. At least, in public. I suspect they sense that the patience of Barcelona residents is about to run out and they must fear that tourism-phobia will stop being suffered in silence, like hemorrhoids, and end up ruining their party. For this reason, the big businessmen in the sector celebrate with a small mouth each pulverized record (tourists per day, cruise passengers, congress attendees...) and are forced to admit that tourism will have to be planned, managed, redistributed and even limited.
Turisme de Barcelona a few weeks ago called for being proud of tourism and regretted that it is held responsible for all the city's ills. That this public-private consortium dedicated to promoting the city asserts itself makes all the sense in the world since it perfectly fulfills its mission: to sell the city's charms to outsiders.
The problem comes with those from here. And Barcelona residents are no longer being sold the bike. Demonstrations against mass tourism are increasingly common in the city, published opinion has also been dealing with tourism as a problem for weeks, and perhaps we should start thinking about reissuing La sortida del laberint, the magnificent essay that economist Miquel Puig published a few years ago, to refute those who still try to trick us with the deceptive argument that tourism generates wealth for everyone.
For all these reasons, the Barcelona City Council has decided to take the initiative and announce that in 2028 it will prohibit all tourist apartments in the city. There are more than 10,100. It is a brave measure that seeks to combat the perverse effects of this type of tourist accommodation on the housing market: sky-high prices, neighbors expelled from their homes, but also serious coexistence problems in residential buildings.
Tourism pollutes. Surely, part of the problems we now have comes from not having known how to see it or having wanted to hide it. That the factories that filled Poblenou in that industrial Barcelona of the first half of the 20th century poisoned the air was evident, one only had to look at the long chimneys that shaped the city's silhouette. Not to mention the pollution of the Besòs and Llobregat rivers, turned into putrid sewers.
"Tourism pollutes. Surely, part of the problems we now have comes from not having known how to see it or having wanted to hide it"The pollution generated by tourist activity is less evident, but equally harmful: gentrification, destruction of the social fabric, disappearance of traditional commerce, overcrowding in certain areas, public transport on the verge of collapse, decline of Catalan, low-skilled and, largely, temporary employment...
We should start calling things by their name: tourism is not a gift from heaven. It is an industry and, as such, it pollutes. The problem is that we cannot move it from the center of Barcelona to industrial estates, as we did more than half a century ago with traditional industries. For tourism, Barcelona is the factory and Barcelonans must try to live among the machinery. If we are not able to mitigate its adverse effects, we run the risk of the city ending up purely as a business. And, paradoxically, this could end the business.