Due to water shortages, overcrowded streets, and rising housing prices, southern Europeans protest against tourists

In different cities of Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece, residents and activists took to the streets this summer, calling on tourists to return home. UNN writes about this with reference to Politico.

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Protesters say that excessive tourism drives up housing prices and makes limited water supplies even more scarce. In drought-stricken urban centers such as Barcelona, tourists consume significantly more water than locals. In parched Sicily, a number of cities have begun to turn away tourists due to water shortages.

At the end of July, about 20 thousand anti-tourism activists gathered in Palma de Mallorca, demanding a change in the tourism model, which they believe is harming the Balearic Islands, whose main three islands are Mallorca, Menorca and Ibiza. In 2023, the total number of tourists on the islands grew to 14.4 million, a huge number for islands with about 1.2 million inhabitants year-round.

In Barcelona, activists sprayed water from water pistols at a smaller protest. The Spanish Minister of Tourism condemned these actions, saying that they do not correspond to the country's culture of hospitality.

Similar anti-tourism protests took place this summer in cities across Spain, including Madrid, Malaga, Granada, and Alicante. Outside of Spain, protests of various levels took place in such tourist centers as Portugal, Italy, and Greece.

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Cities are fighting overtourism with fines, fees, and bans - with varying degrees of success. Some of them have introduced lesser rules to deter tourists: no selfies in the neighborhoods of the Italian city of Portofino, no sitting on the Spanish Steps in Rome, no entering large cruise ships in Croatia's Dubrovnik or Greece's Santorini, no wearing flip-flops on the Cinque Terre. In Venice, the authorities introduced a symbolic entrance fee of 5 euros to limit the number of tourists.

The mayor of Barcelona announced in June that the city would end short-term rental apartments for tourists by 2028 in an effort to avoid the worst of Europe's housing shortage. In the past decade, the Canary Islands, as well as Berlin and Lisbon, have taken similar measures.

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Governments are less likely to impose restrictive measures on tourism. According to Allianz's analysis, tourism is a key pillar of the economy for many EU countries in southern Europe: 11.3% for Croatia and 6% to 8% for Portugal, Greece, Spain, and Italy.

Thanks in part to tourism, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, which had long been outsiders among the major European economies, outpaced the rest of the EU in 2023. While the GDP of the entire bloc grew by 0.5%, the economies of Portugal, Greece, and Spain demonstrated growth rates of more than 2%.