- EURASIAREVIEW.COM - A la une - 30/Jun 23:41

Spain’s Breaking Point With Tourism – OpEd

Overtourism is less a statistical anomaly of visitor numbers than a material and discursive apparatus, one through which growth-oriented development paradigms are rationalized, and ultimately weaponized against the very communities these destinations claim to represent. To that end, it is imperative to recognize that the discourse around overtourism often conceals more than it reveals. It is thus not just that “too many tourists” arrive, but that tourism becomes the hegemonic economic horizon of a city’s future, collapsing alternative visions of development, labour, and land use. Through hyper-specialisation and the overproduction of tourism commodities, these destinations are restructured into mono-industrial service zones, disproportionately vulnerable to external shocks, speculative financialization, and extractive rentier practices. It is crucial to differentiate between destinations historically starved of economic investment and those suffering from a hypertrophic overdevelopment of the tourism sector. How should destinations imagine their futures in the face of the tourism-induced crises of housing, labour, and identity? The politics of overtourism must be recentered as a politics of the commons. For the tourist, the city is a consumable spectacle where the burdens of everyday life can be suspended in exchange for curated experiences. This fleeting joy, however, is structurally dependent on a parallel and increasingly visible erosion of urban habitability for those who call these cities home. For residents, the rapid intensification of tourism has coincided with a deepening crisis of social reproduction. The promise of economic revitalization through the tourism sector has instead yielded widespread housing precarity, infrastructural strain, displacement, and environmental degradation. More than a problem of scale, this is a problem of structure: tourism has been inscribed into the very economic vitality of these cities, rendering them hyper-dependent on flows of transient capital, speculative real estate, and seasonal service labour.  The recent surge of protests in the Canary Islands, Málaga, Amsterdam, Venice, etc., signals a growing backlash against a model of urban development that externalises its costs onto the working class and reifies the city as a commodity. Even as these protests reach new levels of visibility, international arrivals continue to rise. According to recent data, in the first quarter of 2024, international travel to Europe surged by 7.2 percent above pre-pandemic levels, with over 120 million visitors recorded. The postwar tourism development model in Spain must be understood through the lens of Fordist accumulation, adapted to the service economy. Tourism was not merely an economic sector but a spatial fix for surplus capital. It functioned as an extractive industry: one that generated surpluses siphoned off into unrelated productive sectors and speculative infrastructure. The centrality of tourism to national and regional economies across Southern Europe, particularly in post-2008 crisis states, cannot be overstated. In the case of the Canary Islands, for instance, tourism accounted for  percent of regional GDP and 40 percent of total employment in 2022, generating more than €16.9 billion in revenue. At the national level, Spain, relied on tourism for 12.8 percent of GDP in 2023, while in Italy, the sector contributed 10.5 percent of GDP, amounting to €215 billion. A downturn in tourism spells immediate and dramatic consequences: Italy’s 11.2 percent drop in economic output in 2020, was largely the result of the pandemic-induced collapse in tourist arrivals. While tourist numbers rose by 20 percent between 2008 and 2016 in Barcelona, employment in the sector increased by a mere 0.63 percent (Candidatura d’Unitat Popular, 2017). According to the CUP and other grassroots collectives, much of this employment is characterized by precarity, informality, and systemic exploitation. The sector is rife with seasonal contracts, part-time arrangements, and widespread legal grey zones. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic brought global mobility to a sudden halt, discontent over the unchecked expansion of the tourism economy had begun to surface across several European regions, where residents of urban centres and island communities alike had started to mobilize against the social, environmental, and economic pressures of mass tourism. The pandemic functioned as a moment of rupture in the trajectory of urban tourism. International travel by non-European tourists to Europe plummeted by approximately 70 percent in 2020, and an estimated 4.9 million jobs in the tourism and travel sector were lost across the continent between 2019 and 2020. With the lifting of isolationary measures and the return of global mobility, tourism has not merely resumed, it has rebounded with force, surpassing pre-pandemic levels across multiple European destinations. Spain received 42.5 million tourists in the first half of 2024 alone, an increase of 11.5 percent compared to the same period in 2019. Similar trajectories can be observed in Portugal (+12.1%), France (+7.8%), and Italy (+4.4%).  The return of mass tourism has coincided with another destabilizing force: the persistence of post-pandemic inflationary dynamics, which have sharply reduced the purchasing power of working-class and lower-middle-class residents in host communities. As housing, food, and energy prices soar, often amplified by tourism-driven speculative investment, local populations increasingly find themselves priced out of their cities. The result has been a groundswell of public anger, particularly visible in Spanish cities. The systematic conversion of long-term housing into short-term tourist accommodations, and the resulted surge in rental prices has rendered the cost of living unmanageable for many. Beyond housing, the social and ecological impacts of mass tourism have further compounded residents’ frustrations. The prioritization of tourist consumption over local provisioning has led to a scarcity of basic resources. In response, local movements have begun articulating a robust and increasingly coordinated critique of what they refer to as “deregulated mass tourism.” These mobilizations are not rooted in hostility toward visitors per se, but rather in a demand for a tourism model that centres sustainability, equity, and the long-term resilience of host communities. In some cases, these mobilizations have begun to bear fruit. Municipal and regional governments have introduced new regulations aimed at curbing the excesses of the tourism economy, ranging from caps on short-term rentals to zoning restrictions and environmental protections. Yet such reforms remain piecemeal and unevenly enforced, often undermined by vested interests and the enduring lure of tourist revenue.  Venice introduced a daily entry tax on short-term visitors, ostensibly to limit overtourism and generate public revenue for maintenance and infrastructural upkeep. However, the initiative has been met with widespread skepticism. Critics contend that the tax does little to deter actual tourist inflows and merely functions as a symbolic gesture. Barcelona,  has similarly attempted to recalibrate the balance between tourism and livability through a series of policy tools: imposing restrictions on the construction of new hotels in saturated districts, deploying a moratorium on new tourism licenses, and significantly expanding enforcement capacities by hiring additional inspectors to target illegal holiday rentals. The city fined platforms such as Airbnb and HomeAway €30,000 in 2015 for advertising unlicensed apartments, a penalty that escalated to €600,000 in 2016 after continued non-compliance. Nevertheless, even in Barcelona, the transition from emergency regulation to structural transformation remains slow and contested. Elsewhere, similar attempts to assert regulatory sovereignty over tourism have emerged. In the southern region of Andalusia, the regional government has devolved authority to municipalities, allowing local governments to place caps on tourist rental accommodations. Málaga, for example, introduced a provision limiting short-term rentals to properties with independent entrances. In an even more ambitious move, Barcelona’s mayor, Jaume Collboni, has pledged to eliminat...