12mo ago

Barcelona anti-tourism protesters fire water pistols at visitors

edition.cnn.com

Barcelona anti-tourism protesters fire water pistols at visitors | CNN

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).

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12mo ago

Barcelona anti-tourism protesters fire water pistols at visitors

edition.cnn.com /2024/07/08/travel/barcelona-tourism-protests-scli-intl/index.html

197 comments

I fucking guarantee every single one of the locals out there spraying people and yelling at tourists has been a tourist at some point in their life. Even if it was for a day trip to Madrid or Valencia or Bilbao, they were tourists who didn't deserve to be attacked just for seeing some place new. They are just hateful hypocrites who like annoying people for fun.
They have a legitimate concern with housing prices and how the government has allowed (until recently) Airbnb to drive up their housing costs. But the tourists aren't the problem. And if they want to get rid of all tourists, let them A) find out how much their economy relies on tourism, and B) never be allowed to leave their city again.
- They've done a good job of broadcasting that tourism is a problem there. I'll respect that next time I make travel plans. Assuming others think like me, then the protest has been effective.
  
  Yup. Sucks to be those tourists for sure but it's not like they were in danger.
  
  yeah I'll respect that by not going to Barcelona
  
  My understanding is the people understand tourism funds things, but that they dont appreciate the divided treatment, such as the water restrictions tourists do not have to abide by.
  
  Barcelona is overrated anyway, IMO. There are many better cities/towns in Spain.
  
  Never been to Barcelona and never wanted to go even though people kept telling me it’s beautiful (sounded overhyped to me).
  Now I want to go there less, and I’m happy about that :D
- There's a lot of nuance there with very vocal people due to recent history. It also has a lot to do with awareness of the major water restrictions residents are under but tourists are not (thus the water pistols). If they make news scaring off tourists, it forces the government to reconsider the balance they've put on tourist funding vs local economy.
  I'm not saying I like what's happening or not, just saying there is a lot to unpack when you don't live there.
- It's also quite likely the majority was not born in Barcelona
  
  Do you have a source for that?
  
  I don't think that's relevant at all. Residents of Barcelona should still not be pushed out by BnBs.
- People need to realize that tourism is almost like a favour to a country. You literally generate value in your home and go pour it into another economy.
  Tourism has always been mutually beneficial and any government can and has the right to reduce it if they really really want to, they don’t though cause they like the money.
It seems more effective to get short term rentals banned in their city by organizing and speaking to their local city council.
Squirting unsuspecting visitors with water guns seems ineffective and unlikely to achieve any results.
- It got them enough attention to make it to the CNN...
  
  You make a point, but I still question if a CNN article will achieve the desired results. People ought to discuss with their local representatives to achieve things.
- The town hall intends to ban short term rentals in a few years. Definitely far too slow, but it has gotten to the point that even politicians who want to see their city's coffers grow fat admit that it's an economic activity that does more harm than good.
- Yup.
  Like many cities around the world, AirBNB (and similar) redirecting housing into short term rentals has had a massive negative impact on long term housing for local residents.
  
  Well, that and the constant crackdown governments do on new construction. AirBNB takes housing out of the supply and over-strict zoning prevents new housing from coming in.
- I love it. If they protest peacefully like this, it's innefective. If they are violent, or destructive it's innefective. Do you really think if talking with politicians worked we would be in this situation? They are trying to get more attention to the problem and this worked perfectly.
  
  I'm noticing this tactic a lot of people shitting on activism by handwringing about "Oh I'm totally one of you and I totally agree with your goals but your tactics are just going too far!"
  MLK decried this exact thing in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:
  “…that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ ”
  
  Attacking tourists is not exactly a solution and will just fuck their economy up even more.
"...profits from the tourism industry are unfairly distributed and increase social inequality. "
It sounds like the real problem isn't the actual tourists.
- Who should I blame today for our problems, tourists or immigrants?
  Choose one (and please ignore the capitalist elite actually causing these problems)
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.
- 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.
  
  This justifies assaulting people how, exactly?
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  Climate protesters don't assault people who are just sitting down eating. It's not the same.
  (I actually would criticise those climate groups for separate reasons but that's a different conversation).
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  Sorry, how does any of this justify assaulting tourists?
  I'm from London and now live in another tourist heavy city. It doesn't justify assaulting people.
- 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.
  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.
  
  Honestly - I'm quite a well travelled person and Barcelona is absolutely notorious for these groups. They are famous for it. So I stand by what I said. I'm from London and now live in a tourist heavy seaside town. I get it. But it doesn't justify assaulting people.
Squirting people with water in the middle of summer is a punishment? Aim it right at my face, protesters.
- Especially if it's as been as hot in Barcelona as it's been here in North America. It's been ridiculous.
However, the Assemblea de Barris pel Decreixement Turístic says that these visitors increase prices and put pressure on public services, while profits from the tourism industry are unfairly distributed and increase social inequality.
The greedy local businesses and the local government letting them keep their probably ridiculous profits is the problem here.
- We have a similar problem where I live... It became a rich person vacation spot like 15 years ago and now they're ruining the town... They buy up the shops, but gut them from being geared towards those that live here to just throw away vacation trinket shops and stupidly overpriced restaurants that all close from fall to spring. They buy all the available housing so they can spend two fucking weeks a year in the house...
  I can absolutely empathize with these people. At least here, these rich fucking tourists are literal locusts. No one but themselves benefit: they made a closed system that their money circulates in and all the working people have to leave which ALSO benefits the wealthy as their homes become available to buy... Of course too expensive for us to afford, but what's $1+million for a 2 week vacation spot for an obscenely wealthy person...
I don’t even know if they are right or wrong about this, but I stand 1,000% in favor of people getting out in the streets with their water pistols and being the change they want to see in the world
Fuck ‘em up boys, fuck ‘em up. Get those tourists the fuck outta here like a buncha cats that went on the counter.
- I agree. The world would be a better place if more people with grievances used water pistols and fewer used the kind that fire bullets.
  
  Squid, wtf? You’re a mod and this is a direct response to you, TCB son TCB
- I'm going to Barcelona this week on a family trip. We're staying in an AirBnb for a day. I think they've got a legitimate cause to spray people like me, who pretty much across the board don't realize how much their privilege hurts regular working people.
  
  Take a hotel next time. AirBNB is cancer to citizens looking for an appartement.
  
  Well, don't go then, solves everyone's problems if that's how you feel...
What is the temperature in Barcelona right now? I would imagine getting hit with a water gun would feel pretty nice on a hot day of walking around doing touristy stuff.
I can understand the residents and where they're coming from, but protesting against the tourists themselves, people who have already made the trip and are there for a week or two before they fuck off home and who probably don't care and definitely have no control over local politics, rather than against the local owning class making all of the money off of the tourists and who encourage them to keep coming, and the authorities that they pay to enable them, seems like completely missing the point.
- I feel like you're missing the point. It's a protest, and they found an effective way to make their point. These tourists had their day ruined at worst, they'll get over it.
  
  No, it's definitely you who are missing the point.
  I don't feel bad for the tourists, I feel bad for the protestors, because they're wasting their time.
  Because the people they need to be protesting don't give a shit about tourists getting wet either, they've already been paid for these tourists' visit, and millions more to come - because this isn't going to stop any future tourists either, precisely because being shot at with a water pistol is not a big deal.
  This protest is having zero impact on the people the protestors need it to have an impact on, making it wholly ineffective.
I live in a tourism-dependent city and the main problem isn’t tourists as much as AirBnB and similar services fucking up residential neighborhoods, raising rents, etc. And even then, it’s not the original AirBnB concept (of renting your place or spare bedroom out) as much as investors (often institutional investors) buying up dozens of properties and acting as unlicensed, less regulated hoteliers.
I’d be fine with AirBnB if they voluntarily limited that sort of shit or were forced to do it via strong regulations or punitive taxes. We have some OKish regulations. There’s permits and restrictions on density — one per block in residential areas, basically — but lobbyists got involved so half the regulations are about protecting the hotel industry instead of protecting the limited housing stock. And it all relies on AirBnB enforcing the rules when they have the opposite incentive.
Tourism is 5% of Spains GDP.
Have fun with that.
- Which means nothing when it only creates poor paying jobs and pushes everyone out of their cities lol. Most of the money generated by tourism doesnt reach the working class pockets while it clearly makes their quality of life worse. Mass unregulated tourism only helps the wealthy.
  
  It’s not a tourism problem, it’s a regulation problem then… I like the protest and everything but it just feels funny .
  
  Big brain move. The money that’s generated from tourism doesn’t trickle down to the people so instead of going after the rich that control the tourism industry and using unions to lift up their wages they would rather go after the same class of people as them because they’re angry at a system that was designed to make them mad at the tourists rather than those profiting directly from it.
  I’m all for demanding more of a cut of the pie, and being upset about the city not building housing meant for the people that live there, but this is just plain wrong.
  
  It does create jobs though. Think of all the small restaurants and shops and your guides in these areas. This provides real people and income that they go on to spend at other businesses in an area.
  This is why places advertise for people to come, it boosts the economy.
- Most of which is the Balearic isles (40% of local GDP), Canaries (32%), and similar. Barcelona has a way higher GDP/capita than the Spanish average, for the city at large tourism income is pretty much peanuts at ludicrous social cost. Every single employee there to do nothing but wipe tourist asses is lowering GDP, displacing a supercomputer researcher or whatnot.
  If you really want to see the Sagrada Familia or generally are a Gaudi fan fine, it really is the best place to visit for that purpose, otherwise, just go somewhere where your money is actually appreciated. Like, visit Extremadura. Poorest region in Spain, 4.3% of GDP is tourism, rest pretty much agriculture and power generation. Very good cuisine. Very dry heat as you might have guessed from the name.
- Tbh, that's much lower than I expected. They'll probably be fine.
Lots of butthurt entitlement ITT.
- Haha yeah I was about to say, this is a masterpiece of
  *newspaper jumping on the absolutely least significant aspect of smth, just, and really for no other fucking reason, because it activates low stakes unambiguous morals
  *everyone: preaching low stakes morals
  Wel played everyone, you've won the simulator. Turns out you do have a message, you do tell the truth
FIRE WATER
- SpongeBob physics
The lady in the thumbnail looks like Sarah Connor.
Spain has adopted Thailand's Songkran and made their own spin on it.
Sounds like fun.
Your protest should not harm or target individual people, even if that "harm" is a mere annoyance.
- Sounds like a great rule to implement if your goal is completely ineffective protests.
  
  Consent is key. Even if it's a toy, touching/interacting/trapping someone in public is not cool.
  If your protest doesn't maintain consent, it's a mob.
Fuck Spain and their air conditioning rules too.
My personal experiences of this have been being yelled "Go home, tourist!" when I make innevitable driving mistakes in a rental car, while in an area that clearly needs all the tourism money it can get.
People new to or unfamiliar with their "home town" often don't realise tourism is part of the backbone they enjoy, even if a muscle gets pulled now and again.
You mean to tell me you DON'T want people to visit your beautiful city? Then why did you make it so beautiful in the first place? Attracting tourists is an inevitable side effect of that. Just treat them nicely, and they'll treat you back nicely.
Though now I wanna visit Barcelona just to be sprayed with a water gun, it sounds so fun. Just please ask people for consent if you wanna do that.
- Then why did you make it so beautiful in the first place
  Imagine thinking the only reason your city should be a beautiful place to be is so that tourists can enjoy it.
  
  That's probably a good point.
- Most "beautiful" bits people visit are at least a century old, plenty of them like 5+ centuries old. I don't think that people back then were considering tourists.
  I'm either case, weather and natural features play a big role for southern Europe. We didn't decide to have these.
  Also, IIRC, we also didn't ask half of Europe to unbuild itself in this last century. WW2, cities for cars and fucking up nature were not decisions we had a say on.
  It is silly AF to have a German/Brit/French/American/Chinese fuck their country up trough some industrialization and pro-productivity-but-anti-quality-of-life policies, get rich doing it and then proceed to go to a country that has opted to stay out if it to enjoy what they could have at home but decided not to.
  
  That actually makes sense. I really was saying nonsense.
  
  Italy had a bit of a say in it...
Barcelona is Morocco so nobody cares
- Wat? Does you geography?
  Barcelona is in Catalonia its the part of Spain directly across the Pyrenees from Perpignan.
  Are you thinking of Cadiz? (You're still wrong) Or Tangier? Marrakech? Fez? Casablanca?
  And why do you think nobody cares about Morocco?
  
  I think they're trying to be racist.

197 comments