As social life, especially nightlife, has barely recovered, many Barcelona residents will have experienced renewed contact with an animal (as necessary as it is uncomfortable) that the pandemic had almost put in danger of extinction: I am talking about the tourist. Paradoxes of life, visitors have once again colonized Barcelona with a much more salivating eagerness than that of the natives themselves: the post-Covid world will be a universe of lazy citizens for whom going out to dinner during the week or going to a movie theater will seem like a heroic feat that Saint Glovo and Saint Netflix solve with a click. Last year's LABturismo already indicated that Barcelona received 2.4 million tourists, 70% more than in 2020 (and 49.5% less than in 2019); therefore, when the world wakes up again, it is likely that Barcelona will return to the times when 18.5 million foreigners slept, walked, and, fortunately, spent money in the city.
Apart from not having become better people, as the naive predicted, the pandemic has not made us smarter either, and the arrival of visitors in Barcelona will once again pit tourists and purists against each other in a debate in which shades of gray and complexity will be undervalued. To put some brains and less cuñadismo into the matter, it would be worth thinking that during our lives we have all enthusiastically embodied one of the axes of that equation of opposites; all of us, in short, have acted as banal and uncivil tourists, making fools of ourselves in Times Square and peeing in a corner of Harlem (I say this from experience; I have seen many residents of the Eixample doing it when I lived there) and we have also embodied the (easy) opinion against the predatory tourist while we cried over the loss of Barcelona's essence due to the work and grace of visitors whom we impute with a presumption of uncivil guilt.
This servant is lucky enough to live on a tourist street, in the shadow of Santa Eulalia's gaze and in a neighborhood as Instagram-worthy as El Call. Nothing would be easier for me than to become putiniano and advocate for a decree that would limit the entry of tourists into my small corner of the world to prevent its depredation and, incidentally, grant myself the privilege of smoking a cigar in front of San Felipe Neri with only the sound of my footsteps for company. All this would imply an ideal city, but I am also aware that, despite being a protectionist of Ciutat Vella and consuming only in the neighborhood's establishments (especially in those that the snobs call "emblematic businesses"), with my morning croissant or my Ginger Beer (alcohol-free), the owners of La Colmena or Bar Ascensor wouldn't even have enough to pay for electricity. As in any historic center in the world, the gaze must include the uncomfortable shadow of the tourist.
In absolute terms, and the matter is well studied, Barcelona does not have a problem of excessive visitors, but of tourist density; that is, and in plain language, the number of people who visit us is comparable to that of cities in the world that generate interest, and that lasts, but our foreign tourists collapse the same places, generating the feeling that there are areas of the city that have been expropriated from Barcelonans. Contrary to what my dear fellow citizens think, I would say that this is also our responsibility; Barcelonans are, in general, tremendously lazy when it comes to exploring their own neighborhoods and, to put it snobbishly, decentralizing the most crowded areas of the city. No beating around the bush; try to invite your friends to dinner in Horta or invite them to enjoy the splendid cultural program of the Ateneu Popular de Nou Barris. The grimace will be immediate and the comment inevitable: "Damn, that's far!".
While in London, New York or Hong Kong, we Barcelonans are not afraid to undertake real public transport marathons to visit a gallery or a pub, in Barcelona a twenty-minute metropolitan metro journey to Plaza de Eivissa is practically an achievement for us. As much as we have criticized tourists, we Barcelonans have been the first to become more than predictable visitors to our own city. If we don't value El Carmel and we are too lazy to go up to the Fundació Miró because we have to take the bus... how do we expect the world's unveiled visitors to be interested in urban landscapes that are practically deserted or unfairly conceived as marginal? If we don't exile ourselves from Ciutat Vella or the Eixample, how do we expect tourists to be interested in everything that is hidden in the historic center of Sant Andreu or on the terraces of Plaza d'Osca?
If we don't exile ourselves from Ciutat Vella or the Eixample, how do we expect tourists to be interested in everything that is hidden in the historic center of Sant Andreu or on the terraces of Plaza d'Osca?I celebrate that the City Council has decided to extend the commercial hours of many neighborhoods so that tourists (and Barcelona residents!) can walk and consume many Sundays of the year and the neighborhoods of Barcelona thus seem less desolate.It's fantastic that our visitors wander through LesCortsand approach the Place de la Concorde to have a coffee on the magnificent terrace of CanDeu. But perhaps, if you allow me the suggestion, we should first try to get the indigenous people who live a few metro stops away to discover it. I know that my plea breaks the eternal discussion between tourists and purists, and even bets on something as reckless as mixing them. These are bad times for grayish debates and it looks like the future will be somewhat allergic to argumentative complexity; but if there is any redoubt where a debate that goes beyond mere small talk can survive,this oneis that of cities. I sigh.