Protests in Europe target mass tourism with squirt guns and roller bags

Demonstrators in Barcelona, Spain, protest against over-tourism in European cities as they march down the city’s so-called Golden Mile, a street flanked by luxury boutiques and high-end hotels. Photo / Edu Bayer, the New York Times

The squirt guns returned to the streets of Barcelona, Spain, yesterday as thousands gathered for long-planned protests against mass tourism in cities across southern Europe.

In Genoa, Italy, demonstrators rolled suitcases down the city centre’s narrow paved streets, as part of what they called a “noisy stroll”.

In Lisbon, Portugal, protesters carried a handmade effigy of the city’s patron saint from his namesake church to the site of a future five-star hotel.

And on the Spanish island of Mallorca, locals stopped a double-decker tourist bus on Sunday, setting off flares and hanging a banner on its side.

In Barcelona, the centre of recent protests against over-tourism in European cities, demonstrators carrying signs reading “Tourists go home” and “Tourism is stealing from us” marched down the city’s so-called Golden Mile, a street flanked by luxury boutiques and high-end hotels, spraying visitors with water outside a Louis Vuitton store.

Outside a nearby hostel, a scuffle broke out with employees, with some protesters setting off fireworks.

A police barricade stopped the march near the Sagrada Família Basilica, one of the city’s main tourist attractions.

Yesterday’s protests grew out of a weekend of workshops held in Barcelona by the Southern Europe Network Against Touristification in April, after demonstrations last July in which squirt guns emerged as a symbol of anger over the effects of mass tourism.

The protests are the latest in a growing movement driven by quality-of-life issues, including high housing costs and environmental damage, that protest organisers say are a result of over-tourism.

“The general perception is that these people have way more money than we do – they come here to party, to rent places we can’t afford on our wages,” said Joan Mas, a 31-year-old waiter living in Barcelona.

“The problem is the tourism model itself: it’s all about serving drinks, about real estate and the hotel industry.”

Tourism accounts for more than 12% of Spain’s gross domestic product.

Organisers emphasised before yesterday’s protests that their goal was to raise awareness about the negative impacts of their cities’ growing focus on catering to tourists rather than locals.

“Our enemy is not the tourist, but the speculators and the exploiters who hide behind tourism to profit from the housing and lives of the local population,” said Asier Basurto, who helped organise a protest in San Sebastian, a resort city on Spain’s northern coast.

Basurto said the city’s tourism-focused development drove young people away and turned San Sebastian into “a mere stage set”.

Protesters in San Sebastian, which has the nation’s highest housing costs, chanted slogans like “Sustainable tourism is a mythological animal” and called for a decrease in the number of visitors to the city.

Basurto pointed to the Palacio Bellas Artes theatre, a cultural symbol of the city built more than 100 years ago, which is being renovated into a luxury hotel owned by Hilton.

Protests also took place on the popular Spanish resort islands of Mallorca, Minorca, and Ibiza. Those islands, with a population of just over a million, hosted more than 15 million international tourists in 2024.

“This model of tourism doesn’t bring economic prosperity, but rather problems such as the housing crisis,” said Pere Joan Femenia, a spokesperson for the group Less Tourism, More Life, which organised the protests in Palma, Mallorca, where demonstrators stopped the tourist bus.

The islands have faced shortages of police officers, healthcare workers, and teachers, because high housing costs, which protest organisers largely attribute to over-tourism, have made it difficult to attract public sector workers.

In Venice, Italy, which has struggled with the effects of over-tourism and targeted day trippers with a €5- or €10 daily fee, a small protest denounced two hotels recently built in an area that had been hotel-free.

Then a banner reading “STOP HOTEL = + CITTÀ,” more than 6m-long, was loaded on to a boat and floated to another site where a former public housing complex has been transformed into tourist rental units.

Activists in Genoa, where protesters noisily rolled suitcases down the streets, said that even though the city did not see the same level of tourism as other Italian destinations like Rome or Venice, they hoped that by making their demands clear now, they could compel local lawmakers to take steps to manage tourism before it got out of control.

International arrivals in Europe were up nearly 5% in the first part of this year compared with the same period in 2024.

Some travellers caught up in the protests in Barcelona expressed anger.

One visitor in a group of South Korean tourists sprayed with water outside the Louis Vuitton store complained: “This isn’t the way to do things – as if we were animals”.

Taking action on over-tourism

Some destinations have taken action in response to protesters’ concerns.

- The Greek island of Santorini and Bruges, Belgium, have imposed new regulations and taxes on their tourism industries.

- Barcelona plans to ban Airbnb rentals by late 2028.

- Ibiza and other places are limiting cruise ships.

- Officials in Palma announced an initiative just days before the protests to remove more than 1600 lounge chairs from local beaches, responding to pressure from activists to make it easier for residents to enjoy the sea.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Written by: Gabe Castro-Root

Photograph by: Edu Bayer

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