For Barcelona’s tourism industry, the past week may have marked the end of an era. While Spain’s second city has seen galloping, almost uncontrollable growth in tourism since the millennium, the city voted Friday to adopt the most drastic ban on new vacation accommodations yet seen in any European city.
In the city center, all new hotel beds are banned, period. In a small area encircling the city center, new hotel beds will be permitted, but only to replace those in hotels that have closed. In Barcelona’s suburbs, new hotel beds will be permitted, but only under strictly limited conditions—land that has previously been earmarked for housing, for example, will be completely off limits. [...]
If these measures seem extreme, it’s because local frustration at the excesses of the tourist industry has been bubbling over for some time. A city of 1.6 million inhabitants, Barcelona received 32 million visitors last year, most of them concentrated in late spring and summer. These tourists are of course a cash cow, but they have pushed up the price of rents and reduced the number of available apartments for locals while providing jobs that are often poorly paid and merely seasonal. They have also squeezed businesses catering to locals out of the downtown, leaving a trail of tourist stores that are dull, generic, and sell goods with little real connection to the city’s culture. This has given some overburdened parts of the city the air of a theme park—one where you wait in line a lot and don’t have that much fun.
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