- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmit.online
Protesters in Barcelona have sprayed visitors with water as part of a demonstration against mass tourism.
Demonstrators marching through areas popular with tourists on Saturday chanted “tourists go home” and squirted them with water pistols, while others carried signs with slogans including “Barcelona is not for sale.”
Thousands of protesters took to the streets of the city in the latest demonstration against mass tourism in Spain, which has seen similar actions in the Canary Islands and Mallorca recently, decrying the impact on living costs and quality of life for local people.
The demonstration was organised by a group of more than 100 local organizations, led by the Assemblea de Barris pel Decreixement Turístic (Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth).
Screw these guys. Whatever your position on the matter it’s not the tourists themselves who are culpable, but the national and local government for allowing their economy to be so reliant on tourism.
It doesn’t justify assaulting and harassing people in the streets.
Barcelona is not the only city in the world that attracts a large number of tourists. Many cities attract more. Yet Barcelona is the only place I see with so many of these xenophobic nutjobs.
It’s a protest. Same thing as climate protestors blocking the roads, no the individual commuters are not responsible for climate change, but the blocking roads is an effective way to draw attention to the issue.
Protests need to be disruptive or they won’t be effective. These tourists had their day/lunch ruined at worst, the protestors are fighting for affordable living in the city they live in and they clearly have found an effective way to protest.
So yeah no, I feel bad for the tourists but that’s about it.
Those tourists can’t even vote. With climate protests at least you are raising awareness in people that can have some change or make some pressure.
Yes protests need to be disruptive but spraying people in London would be just as effective as spraying tourists that are ALREADY in their city.
These specific tourists were not targetted to change their minds. It was done to spread awareness and get coverage in the international media that Barcelona has nad enough of tourists.
It worked. So it 's a successful protest.
I guess you are right that it created news but I doubt it will have the desired effect. One does not guarantee the other necessarily
If we only did things that have guaranteed outcomes, not much would get done.
If the government is sitting on its hands then you can’t blame them for doing something themselves. So I would blame the government for the protests and not the protesters. It’s their home, not a theme park.
Yes but you could raise awareness in different ways or complain in a different place.
Those tourists are already there. They aren’t gonna pack up and leave. Sure they are probably not going to recommend Barcelona to their friends in the future but that’s insignificant.
Those tourists can’t even vote in legislation that would fix it, because they don’t live there. So it’s literally barking at the wrong tree.
And for the record, I’m very much aware that protests are almost by definition annoying. I’m very much for all the climate protests even when they block roads and such.
Then you’re not paying attention. Plenty of such protests-with-thousands in a few major places that were overwhelmed. Barcelona, Maiorca, Lisbon, Algarve, probably most of Greece, Italy, Southern France, etc…
It is not false that the government has blame, however, there’s plenty of preverse incentive in here. Land prices skyrocketed and a lot of very well positioned individuals got very well in life.
At the end of the day, being a decent human being doesn’t require laws. If you know you’re competing with locals whose rents already are higher than their salaries, with their businesses that now can’t support rents any longer and generally browsing fake-local-crap (and I assure you that most mass tourism is), then you’re just making yourself unwelcome.
Even the “tourists are injecting money in the local economy” argument is in a good part bullshit. Ofc that some of it loops to everyone else, but the gains are generally very poorly distributed and many times negative as that money destroys homes and jobs.
If you go to some parts of Lisbon, you’re not going to be able to hear one single word of Portuguese. Just yday I heard about a guy complaining that tourists attempted to forbid him from going into a waterfall near his home because… It ruins their photos and they waited in line to have them while the guy just “skipped the queue”. Mass-tourists can’t just figure that it is a country where people live and not a theme park, the “we paid to come here, we have rights” argument is heard plenty of times.
Nothing worse than hearing that self-entitled argument along with “you’re not complaining when we use all our money here are ye???” Makes my blood boil.
Aren’t you figuring that we’d rather not have that? That money is mostly not reaching anyone but landlords, restaurant owners and rickshaws. We get poorer with tourism money.
The jobs that pay us more than 860€ (the minimum salary) disappear with mass tourism because 1) land values get too expensive 2) a lot of highly qualified people just emigrated away after being unable to pay rent.
People who attended STEM fields know that the way to get proper jobs is to leave the country, which is bloody unfair because we used to have them. Instead of 3k/mo white-collar jobs we get 860€/mo whipping simulators dealing with entitled tourists.
Ofc that not every job disappeared but since the economy is highly uncompetitive with it’s tourism focus, you get the worst possible scenario for everything else.
I’m going to guess you’re using an empiric “you”, because I was trying to agree with you! Everything you said is on point.
Then you’ve never interacted with the locals in these other places. Having grown up in a vacation town, I can tell you right now that the only difference here is that the people with water guns have hit their breaking points.
Have you ever seen the movie Jaws? There’s a small throwaway bit in there where the wife of the chief of police is asking a friend of hers when she gets to be an islander (because the family had recently moved to the island from New York), and her friend responds, “Never. If you weren’t born here, then you’re not an islander.” Having grown up near where that movie was made, that’s 100% accurate to the local sentiment. On that island, they call people who move there “wash ashores” because they feel that they washed up like the flotsam and jetsam on the beach. In my town, we called the rich people who would come up to vacation in their lavish summer homes “snowbirds” because they migrated at the same time as the birds and couldn’t handle the winter weather.
The most consistent thing I’ve found about tourist areas is the negative impact the industry has on the area for locals and the hatred locals feel towards the tourists.
Whether these people are acting rightly or wrongly, they’re trying to hit the government and businesses where it hurts most - their profits - because it’s the only way they’ll ever care about the local problems.