Hold on to your buttresses
There are worse forms of pollution than tourists
About three decades ago, in preparation for the 1992 Summer Olympics, Barcelona made the critical error of trying to make its city even more pleasant and livable - pedestrianizing streets, expansion of public transportation, etc. Other cities have tried this and mostly failed, but Barcelona had the poor fortune of actually succeeding, and now it is the most heavily touristed city in the entire world.
12 million people flock to the city of 1.6 million residents every year. A considerable love-hate relationship exists between the locals and tourists, particularly in those locations which are most pleasant - walkable, filled with amenities (shops, fountains, public seating, etc), and packed with attractions of aesthetic and historic significance.
During COVID the residents briefly had some respite from the hordes of visitors, and attempts were made to limit the worst knock on effects of mass tourism, but as one city official has put it:
“I can’t put up walls around the city. I can’t move the Sagrada Familia. But there’s a lot of things I can do.”
I don’t have anything like a solution for this - I don’t even come from a city that has attempted to make itself more livable or pleasant in quite some time1 - but I’ve been trying to make an effort to be less generally annoying than the median visitor:
- Not walking insanely slowly and somehow blocking 20ft of a pedestrian walkway with my very large (wide and numerous) family
- Refraining from just getting hammered and taking up all the space on the public beach
- At least trying to speak in the actual native language where possible (Catalan)
Will this let me feel less guilty about visiting an overly-touristed region? No. Will it stop me? Also no, apparently.2
So my next posts will be about the fair city of Barcelona, which I have the great privilege of visiting riding on the coattails of my partner who is here on a work trip. I’ll be referring quite a lot to the Pocket Barcelona by Rick Steves - a fine travel writer and a genuinely good person3
Seattle just replaced a hideous waterfront highway with another hideous waterfront highway, it is in no danger of becoming a massive tourism hotspot. ↩
Maybe I’ve gotten a bit more radical in different ways on topics such as these, but systemic issues call for systemic solutions - not individualized guilt trips. There are better forms of direct action than giving up plastic straws. I’d name them here, if I felt like getting a visit from the FBI or Secret Service. ↩
I know I just got done saying individualized actions are insufficient for systemic problems. That’s still true, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you shouldn’t do good things (like literally giving away an apartment building so the worst off among us have housing). Arguably, networks of care that can be enhanced or kicked off by individual actions are an important start. ↩
