Good morning! When I saw the other day the residents of Barcelona spraying tourists with water guns and telling them to go home, it’s not that I didn’t understand them. All of us who live in tourist destinations develop this aversion to tourism and tourists feeling over time.
Click here to join our Viber group, where we update you live from hour to hour and answer your questions directly.
Tourism cataclysm
A few days ago, thousands of citizens gathered in Barcelona, as reported by world news agencies, to protest against “excessive tourism”. People took to the streets with placards and shouted “Tourists, go home”, demanding restrictions on mass tourism. The mayor of Barcelona has promised to reduce the number of permits for renting out apartments and thus try to limit the number of tourists in the city.
There are many reasons why people are dissatisfied. As a resident of Budva, I can completely understand them. If you are not the owner of real estate for rent, a hotel, or if you generally don’t live from tourism, tourism brings more costs and headaches to you personally than benefits. And most people in Budva today do not live directly from tourism.
Traffic jams, overcrowded beaches, noise, rising prices of food and housing. Tenants have to agree to higher rents during the season, or to move. Pollution. These are all reasons why we all collectively breathe a sigh of relief in September.
I reminded an insert from a student film when in Sucuraj on Hvar in Croatia, a local man welcomes the ferry boat in September and tells tourists coming out of it to get lost. He curses them in all languages and tells a man reproaching him that they had all summer to come.
It is certainly selfish what I am going to write now, because I do not live from tourism, but the most beautiful season ever was the one during the covid pandemic. In my almost forty years, I felt for the first time what it means to spend the summer in my city. We had the beaches to ourselves, there were no crowds and noise, and Budva showed itself in its most beautiful light. Especially when you go and walk through the old town at dawn in the middle of summer, and there is nothing that smells of urine, garbage and vomit.
Don’t get me wrong, I look forward to guests. Many friendships, including my father’s marriage and my marriage, are the results of tourism. Tourism paid for my education. Tourism makes a great deal of our GDP.
The problem is overcrowding and the lack of a strategy to limit this overcrowding. Climate changes, the worsening global political situation and economic crises make tourism unsustainable in the long run.
I can’t even understand tourists who, after working all year, save up to come on vacation, and come in the middle of July in the crowd and heat. They have nowhere to bathe, they can’t eat or drink normally, and they can’t even sleep because of the noise. What kind of vacation is that?
Something has to change at a global level because the mass concept of tourism does more harm than good to the local community. Visits to museums and famous buildings are becoming more and more a cause for nervousness than for enjoyment.
In the end, sooner or later, we will all realize that it is best to relax in the countryside. Whether that village is located by the sea or on a mountain. I’m just afraid that if we figure it out, we’ll turn those villages into a tourist hell.
That’s it for today and this week. See you again on Monday.
Kind regards,
Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM analyst and columnist
(The opinions and views of the authors of the columns are not necessarily those of the CdM editorial staff)
