Wednesday, August 21, 2024 During this summertime, scores of native activists in Barcelona condemned overtourism. However, increased crowds are predictable to surface for America’s Cup. Young protesters could be seen with pizza boxes and bottles of cheap cava in Carmel Bunkers in the Spanish city.
On a hill facing the Catalan capital, the concrete edifices formerly stored antiaircraft arms that sheltered Barcelona throughout Spain’s civil war in the 1930s. At a later date, the place became a site for inhabitants for evening walks and a retreat for native youngsters. However, this happened before Instagram and TikTok came in.
Years earlier, encouraged by social media, young tourists started making the Carmel Bunkers a deferred place for drinking, partying and the must-do sunset selfie. However, last spring, the clamor, confusion and total number of tourists prompted Barcelona to create barriers all over the place. In the current context, scores of tourists can locate any space they can in the midst of the adjoining thicket and rocks.
Sometimes, they even need to jump the fences. According to a longtime resident of this place, she recollected that she used to play there as a girl. Now there are drunken travelers peeing on the doorsteps of their neighbor.
With regard to the complex delineations of overtourism in the Spanish city of Barcelona, the Carmel Bunkers is a good place to begin this protest demonstration. The obstructions faced by those who live close are also applicable to other hotspots. For example, there are inhabitants of the Gothic Quarter feeling exiled by the masses; then there is contamination along the waterside where huge cruise ships dock; everywhere, it appears that there is an obvious disrespect for indigenous culture.
In the month of July, Barcelona grabbed headlines globally when approximately 3,000 inhabitants of the city protested with regard to overtourism, some residents even shooting visitors with water guns on the city’s well-known avenue Las Ramblas. News outlets wondered that concerns regarding tourism, which have been smoldering for years, not only in Barcelona, but all through Europe, had finally simmered over into out-and-out aggression. In the Catalan capital, there is a resolve to cracking this problem whose origins can largely be traced to the 1992 Olympic Games, which presented crowds of tourists to the beautiful city, changing its lucks.
The advent of Ryanair in 2010 had a key influence, starting a new age of low-cost tourism, and a noticeable growth in cruise travel fetched hundreds of thousands of day-trippers in the city. Even Airbnb encouraged the change of residential accommodation to more lucrative temporary rentals. Revenge tourism followed after the pandemic.
But now, Barcelona is doing everything to keep tourism under check..
