Drunk visitors, rocketing rents and homogenised cafes: living in Europe’s tourist hotspots

A protest in Barcelona in June against overtourism. At one demonstration locals squirted tourists with water pistols. Photograph: Emilio Morenatti/AP

In July, protesters took to the streets of Palma, the Mallorcan capital, carrying placards with slogans such as “no to mass tourism” and “tourism, but not like this”.

Although he did not attend, Jaume Fuster, 27, a local, agreed with the messages. “They should be a wake-up call to our politicians to legislate against the overcrowding and bring in laws that improve the quality of life of us residents,” the hotel worker said.

The island’s housing crisis is out of control, he added. Like many of his friends, he lives with his parents. “It is impossible to live independently on our salaries,” said Fuster, who is employed for only eight months of the year.

As a hospitality worker, he recognises the benefits of attracting visitors to the island where he has grown up. “Tourism is the economic engine of Mallorca,” he said. “But every year we have record numbers of people coming. The demand doesn’t stop.”

The swelling numbers of visitors are intensifying the pressure on climate-stretched resources: in some areas of the island, restrictions on water use were announced in July.

The roads are clogged with rental cars, and public transport is unable to support the ever-rising number of tourists, he said; Mallorca, which has a population of just under a million, expects to host about 20 million visitors this year. But Fuster, whose family has a jewellery shop on the island, said that most ordinary Mallorcans were not reaping the economic benefits, adding that he believed the rise of all-inclusive resorts meant tourists were less likely to spend money with local businesses.

Mallorca is not alone in hosting protests against overtourism: thousands of people from across southern Spain took to the streets of Málaga on 29 July, while Unesco recently warned this wave of opposition could spread across Europe.

Barcelona was thrown into the spotlight this summer after protesters squirted tourists with water pistols. In destinations that have attracted rising numbers post-pandemic, people are asking how a balance can be struck between welcoming visitors – and the jobs and revenue they bring – and preserving the places they call home.

Living in a central Barcelona neighbourhood for 20 years, Alba had observed how the surging numbers of visitors flocking to the city were warping its character. “In my neighbourhood there used to be an old ironmongery, a butcher, many small businesses running for decades,” she said. But over the years many had become bars and restaurants catering to tourists.

Barcelona announced in June that it will ban apartment rentals to tourists by 2028 after an outcry from locals. Alba said the spread of short-term lets in the city centre disrupted the flow of residents’ lives.

“Drunk tourists blocking the entrance to our building, smoking in our faces as we tried to exit, screaming like madmen until 2am. Even inside our building, drunk Airbnb tourists have [mistakenly] tried to open our door at night,” she said. By 2021, she’d had enough, and relocated to a neighbourhood on the city’s periphery.

In the Portuguese capital Lisbon, the growing number of tourists is putting pressure on the housing market. Teresa, a 29-year-old project manager, said she constantly had to push past crowds of tourists admiring the azulejos (traditional Portuguese tiles). Post-pandemic, digital nomads also played a role in distorting the city’s housing market, she added.

Those able to work remotely were attracted by benefits including Portugal’s digital nomad visa, which offers one-year residency on proof of a minimum €2,800 a month income. Portugal has since implemented a crackdown on holiday lets and restricted its “golden visa” scheme, which offered foreigners the chance to gain citizenship by buying property worth at least €500,000.

Teresa, who said she is lucky to rent a more affordable flat using a relative’s “decades’ old lease”, has returned to her home town a remote employee herself, after living in France, and acknowledges the irony. “People are even more pissed off at digital nomads, I think – with tourism, at least you can say it creates jobs. Rents can be put up so much because they’re renting to people without Portuguese salaries.”

Teresa also felt that as the city embraced digital nomadism, parts of Lisbon were becoming homogenised, dominated by cafes where remote workers gather with their laptops but where most Portuguese cannot afford the prices.

Florence is so saturated with holidaymakers that Camilla Torna, a designer, said: “I hardly hear Italian spoken in the streets – one day it’s all French, then it’s all Spanish, then all Russian.” It “comes in waves”, she said, depending on which tour operator is in town.