They throw water at them: Mayor of Barcelona rejects hostilities against tourists

The mayor of Barcelona, ​​the socialist Jaume Collboni, expressed this Wednesday his rejection of “any hostility” towards tourists and assured that “Visitors are welcome” to the city “wherever they come from”.

Collboni was speaking out in this regard regarding the scenes that took place last Saturday in which hundreds of protesters were shooting tourists with water pistols, in protest against the mass tourism that is making housing more expensive and driving residents out of their neighbourhoods.

In a meeting with the mayor of Madrid, José Luís Martínez Almeida, organized by the newspaper La Vanguardia, the mayor of Barcelona stated that overcrowding is also a problem for the tourism sector itself but considered that the displays of hostility towards visitors “They have no place”.

Last weekend’s march, called for by more than 140 organisations, called for a change of direction in the tourism model of the city, which has nearly 1.6 million inhabitants and which last year received nearly twelve million tourists, according to data from the City Council.

Under the slogan ‘Enough! Let’s put limits on tourism’, a banner at the head of the demonstration called for ‘Tourism decline, now’, while some participants carried others such as ‘Tourists go home’ and ‘Neighbours in danger of extinction’.

In the talk, Collboni also stated that from Barcelona “Tourism is defended, even from its own threats”, and that is why he has decided to set limits.

The mayor of the Catalan capital recently announced that from November 2028 there will be no more tourist apartments in the city, where it is estimated that there are around 10,000 although it is feared that there are many more illegal ones. European cities such as Paris and London, or American cities such as New York, have already taken measures to limit this type of accommodation.

The phenomenon of the increase in tourist rental housing to the detriment of rentals for residents, which provides greater profitability for owners but makes access to housing more expensive, especially for low and middle income earners, affects many Spanish cities.

This has led to demonstrations such as those seen last Saturday in Barcelona, ​​particularly in the main Spanish tourist cities on the coast such as Malaga (Mediterranean) and Cadiz (Atlantic), in the region of Andalusia.

According to the latest figures published at the beginning of the month by the National Institute of Statistics, the arrival of foreign tourists to Spain continues to set records, with 33.2 million visitors between January and May, 13.6% more than a year earlier, with an associated expenditure of 43.2 billion for the Spanish economy, 21.8% more than in 2023.