When tourists were sprayed with water guns last summer by protesters in Barcelona, the world seemed to realise that residents of heavily-visited European cities were not just slightly perturbed by mass tourism. Many were actively against it.
But as protesters and tourists gear up for another summer, the same group that organized the protests in Barcelona, followed by similar marches in Mallorca and the Canary Islands, is now at work on another idea. Gone is the idea of public organisations in individual cities. Instead, the plan is to combine activist groups from across southern Europe for a day of mobilisation.
That day – write this down, tourists – is June 15, and participating cities include Barcelona, Lisbon, Venice, Palermo, Naples, Marseille and Genoa. Each individual city will decide on its own tactic, and many are still planning their strategies. But emboldened by the success of last summer’s efforts, which activists noted at a late April press conference “marked a significant leap, both in terms of quality and quantity”, these protests are united in their message.
“We must push for the changes and policies that our cities and regions, the people who live in them, and the whole planet need,” said activists from the Southern European Network Against Touristification, a conglomerate of various locally-based activist groups against tourism, which met in Barcelona. This change would come about, they said, by “limiting tourism-driven exploitation, transforming economic models by placing our lives and ecosystems at the centre, and putting an end to this model of tourism as blind and unlimited consumption of spaces, their resources and local people.”
The timing is ripe. All tourist projections for the summer of 2025 suggest a continued increase in numbers. International tourist arrivals are slated to grow 3-5% in 2025 compared to 2024.
Tourism’s appeal is generally framed in terms of economic development, and the numbers bear this out. In Spain, for example, the industry represents 13% of the nation’s GDP. According to research from CaixaBank, last year, visitors to Spain spent an average of €1,326 each in the country. In 2024, the World Travel and Tourism Council forecast that the sector would reach almost 11% of Italy’s total economy, worth more than €223bn.
These are the pro-tourism arguments that the campaigners are most keen to confront. “One of the biggest problems is that we are told: tourism feeds us,” said Federico Prestileo, a researcher from Palermo involved in campaigning against overtourism in the city. “It’s not livable.”
Residents like Prestileo say that mass tourism has created an unending dynamic of low-paying jobs and increasing rents that have pushed more and more longtime inhabitants out of city centers and cities altogether to make room for, essentially, more tourists. This has become such a problem that the mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, even met Barcelona Mayor Jaume Collboni, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and the Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez on what Gualtieri called the “housing emergency” that is affecting “all of the major European cities”.
“The right to housing is a pillar of the European social model, which, after having been forgotten and disregarded for too long, must return to the center of the political agenda,” Gualtieri wrote on Facebook.
But while Southern European cities may feel disproportionately hit by the housing crisis due to the sudden upsurge in the number of short-term holiday lets, the rising cost of living is, in fact, a Europe-wide issue. In 2023, more than 10% of European households in cities were spending more than 40% of their disposable income on housing costs, which indicated an overburdened financial situation. The data also shows that northern European countries like Denmark, Norway and Sweden have similar or even worse housing cost issues.
Groups like the Assemblea de Barris pel Decreixement Turístic in Barcelona have collected data on short-term housing and found that there are more than 21,000 tourist lodgings in the city, more than 15,000 of which are AirBnBs. According to data analyzed by Barcelona Metròpolisn, the average monthly rent in the city of Barcelona went up from around €630 in 2005 to €964 in 2020: a 50% increase in only 15 years.
In Palermo, Prestileo’s Assemblea Permanente di Resistenza all’Overtourism recently began collecting signatures for a petition to regulate short-term rentals in the city. In just a couple of hours, he said, it already had 200 signees.
Prestileo’s group also reached a certain level of public awareness last July, when it hung a banner reading “Touristification is the new plague” during the feast day of the city’s 12th-century patron saint, Santa Rosalia, who protected Palermo from the plague.
Whether through water guns or plague-decrying banners, activists have often found the public attack on tourism to be an effective strategy. In cities like Genoa and Florence, protesters have taken to taping their messages on top of the various lockboxes that sit outside the cities’ many rental properties. In Genoa, according to organizer Elena Boschi, stickers read, in four different languages: “Your Bnb, my expulsion.”
Perhaps what these activist organisations are trying to capture is not just the difficulty of affording housing but the difficulty of actually finding it to begin with. Social science scholars at the University of Naples Federico II note that tourism can bring with it its own form of gentrification, “where traditional lifestyles and community structures are displaced by tourism-driven development.” And while it can be a powerful economic tool, tourism can also lead to a lack of “economic diversity and reliance,” with revenue that can go to investors rather than local residents.
In Venice, one of the European cities perhaps most hit by tourism, members of the Civic Observatory on Venetian homes and residences put together a series of narratives, aptly titled “Sad Stories,” based on real estate data, to show that the tale of the short-term rental of the family home that helps Venetians to stay afloat is just that: a fairytale. Instead, many of the owners of short-term rentals in Venice are foreign, already work in lucrative industries or rent out multiple apartments.
“We did this precisely to deconstruct the narrative that, one, this is necessary to survive, and, two, that it is done almost as a service to the city,” said Maria Fiano, a member of the observatory. “In reality, these are people who obviously have an extremely high budget and, above all, use this as income.”
Last year, Venice controversially instituted an access fee, only applicable on certain days of the high season, for day visitors. The fee is either €5 or €10, depending on how far in advance the ticket is booked, and it netted the city of Venice €2.8m last year. But a study conducted from last year’s data, reported by The New York Times, indicated that there had been no immediate effect on attendance. Instead, there were actually higher numbers of visitors on the days when a fee was being charged.
“This has absolutely nothing to do with the issue and instead offers a view of the city as a theme park, which is completely counterproductive, serious and dangerous and forces us all to justify why we are coming to Venice,” Fiano said.
Other cities, like Naples, are grappling with the relatively recent arrival of widespread touristification. From 2010 to 2019, overnight stays and arrivals in the city doubled. In June 2023, Naples already had more short-term housing options on Airbnb, at almost 9,000, than Venice, according to data cited by Alessandra Esposito, researcher and member of the Naples-based activist group Resta Abitante.
“I was born in Naples, my family was born in Naples and my entire family was expelled from Naples,” Esposito said. “We have been in the city for generations, but now it is very difficult for people from my social class to stay in the city and find a job that enables them to afford housing.”
Perhaps running below the cultural discussions about overtourism and rising cost of living is another question: what will our cities become if they lose the very characteristics that make them special? Activists are seeing more and more traditional businesses disappear, becoming replaced by shops marketed toward an explicitly tourist clientele, like brunch spots and craft beer bars.
“There are streets where you practically can’t walk at certain times of the day,” Prestileo said of Palermo. “You just can’t get through, and you don’t hear Italian spoken as you walk by.”
The tension for activists is that in discouraging all tourism, you may end up inadvertently encouraging only one kind of tourism, what they called “quality tourism”, which essentially translates to tourism conducted by the elites. This is not the end goal of their efforts.
Yet Prestileohe often finds that some of the biggest resistance to pushing back against mass tourism comes not from its promoters but the residents themselves. In cities like Palermo and Naples, there is a wide gap between what was and what is.
“In 30 years, you went from having bombs to having cruise ships. My father and mother said to me, ‘It wasn’t better before,’” Prestileo said. “Of course, without a doubt. But it’s not good now either.”
Elizabeth Djinis is a journalist based in Rome
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