It’s well past the August holiday peak, but anger against over-tourism in Spain is spilling into the off-season, as holiday-makers continue to seek winter sun.
On Sunday locals in the Basque city of San Sebastian plan to take to the streets under the banner: “We are in danger; degrow tourism!”
And in November anti-tourism protesters will gather in Seville.
Thousands turned out last Sunday in the Canary Islands, so the problem is clearly not going away.
This year appears to have marked a watershed for attitudes to tourism in Spain and many other parts of Europe, as the post-Covid travel boom has seen the industry equal and often surpass records set before the pandemic.
Spain is expected to receive more than 90 million foreign visitors by the end of the year. The consultancy firm Braintrust estimates that the number of arrivals will rise to 115 million by 2040, well ahead of the current world leader, France.This year’s protests began in April, in the Canary Islands, and included a hunger strike by six protesters in Tenerife in an attempt to halt two major tourism projects on the island.
They continued in many of the country’s most popular tourist destinations, such as the Balearic Islands, the Mediterranean city of Alicante, cities on the southern coast and Barcelona, where some protesters squirted foreign visitors with water pistols and shouted: “Tourists go home!”.
The grievances driving the upcoming protests are similar to those in the summer.
“Tourism, which for a few is the golden goose, is an economic model which is choking the rest of us,” said Bizilagunekin (or “with the neighbours”, in the Basque language), the civic association which is organising Sunday’s demonstration in San Sebastian.
The protest is the culmination of a series of debates, talks and other events in the city called “October against touristification”.
“What we’ve been seeing over the last eight or 10 years has been a huge acceleration of the process of ‘touristification’,” said Asier Basurto, a member of the platform. “All our city’s services have been put at the orders of the tourism industry.”
