Barcelona’s tourism economy is already significant, contributing almost 13% of the city’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce. Much of this income is attributable to the pulling power of Catalan architect Gaudí and his iconic structures such as the Sagrada Familia cathedral and La Pedrera. Street closures for the Pope As we reported recently, the Pope will be in town this week to celebrate the topping off of the highest tower of the Sa

Barcelona is a city facing enormous tourism pressure. This has encouraged a series of measures to control tourism, including restricting Airbnb (due to be banned completely by 2028), increasing the tourism tax and banning pub crawls. In common with cities like Amsterdam, Barcelona is trying to adopt a placemaking approach to tourism, rather than place marketing. Tourism policy is orientating towards improving the quality of life for residents, rather than attracting more and

Walking through the Eixample in the centre of Barcelona one encounters an interesting exercise in bottom-up critique of urban speculation and touristification. A series of posters erected at the bottom of Passeig Sant Joan by the Associació de Veïns i Veïnes de la Dreta de Eixample - (Residents Association of the Right of the Eixample) provides a stark example of the effects of speculation and tourist pressure in the centre of Barcelona. Density of tourist beds in the Eixamp

December 11th marks 40 years since the launch of the campaign ‘Barcelona, posa’t guapa’ (Barcelona, make yourself beautiful). This urban renovation programme coincided with the preparations for the 1992 Olympic Games, the event that propelled the city onto the world stage. At that point, the writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán recalled that the city was like “a sunken Titanic”. (in Ferrer Viana, 2001: 16)17. The Barcelona, posa’t guapa campaign had two main elements: renovating

One of the common strategies to deal with the challenges of touristification in destinations such as Barcelona has been to push for ‘quality tourism’. The idea is that fewer tourists can generate just as much economic benefit, as long as they spend more. Alongside attracting tourists who stay longer and spend more, Barcelona’s strategy now aims to spread tourism throughout Catalunya, easing pressure on the city itself. Quality tourism? Recent figures indicate that tourist arr

We all think we know what ‘local’ means. Usually, it is tied to people who live in a particular place, and we usually assume that the locals were born there and have been living there their whole lives. In major cities, that picture is changing fast. As we reported in a previous post, in Amsterdam, the number of residents has grown by almost a quarter since 2008, with much of the growth coming from migration. In Barcelona, the shift has been even more dramatic, with the propo

One of the most enduring tourism myths is the idea that cultural tourism is growing faster than other sectors of global tourism. Ever since Bywater conjured up the ‘statistic’ that cultural tourism was growing at 15% a year in 1993, this idea has continued to gain popularity – despite no hard evidence being presented. In the book Rethinking Cultural Tourism, Greg Richards examined the available evidence for this apparent boom in cultural tourism, which continues to this day.

In their efforts to stem the tide of tourists, cities often forget that they have usually been at the forefront of tourism development and promotion. One of the effects of this legacy is that many cities are trying to cut down the numbers of visitors while the number of hotels is growing. This is because it takes years for new hotels to get a licence, so there is usually a reservoir of new hotels waiting to open, even when a city tries to implement a ‘hotel stop’, as Amsterda

At a recent Tourism Society webinar we discussed the increasingly contentious concept of overtourism. One of the issues with overtourism is it suggests that the number of tourists is to blame for a range of problems experienced in cities such as Venice, Barcelona or Amsterdam. These include rising prices, housing shortages and overcrowding. But given the complexity of contemporary urban environments it seems unlikely that tourism can be the root of all these problems. It is