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).
Talking about Barcelonas and most cities’ gentrification problem, it’s not capitalism is what I meant for “blaming the system”. Then the other was regarding “regulation”. The incentive could be elsewhere instead, e.g. let BCN be a tourism whorehouse and improve the QOL in the suburbs, connect them with trains, shift big tech companies to relocate with tax benefits etc . It’s not a tourism problem its an everybody wants to be in the same city problem. Just expand what makes BCN amazing outwards . Transport , bike lanes , wide roads and urban planning . It’s like, they made one great plan and they forgot to iterate on it for the current time, and expand it properly. I don’t feel it’s fair to use capitalism as a sort of “swear word” freely . Like you state the problem can be attacked from a lot of angles and it’s not a “capitalism” problem but the sum of relations and norms , wants and needs. If all cities were “not capitalist” there would still be some more coveted than others and that would create a housing problem anyway.