a day ago
Campaigners protest against overtourism in Southern European hotspots
Campaigners in at least a dozen tourist hotspots across southern Europe have taken to the streets to protest against 'touristification'.
It is the most widespread joint action to date against what they see as the steady reshaping of their cities to meet the needs of tourists rather than those who live and work there.
Thousands were expected at marches in cities including Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca on Sunday, while others will stage more symbolic actions.
In the Italian city of Genoa, campaigners will drag a cardboard cruise ship through the old town's narrow alleyways to show that tourism does not fit in the city.
Threading through all the actions is a rallying cry for a rethink of a tourism model that campaigners say has increasingly funnelled profits into the hands of a few, while leaving locals to pay the price through soaring house prices and rents, environmental degradation, and the proliferation of precarious, low-paying jobs.
The bulk of Sunday's action was expected to take place in Spain, where tourist arrivals surged last year to record levels. A handful of cities in Italy and Portugal are taking part.
The aim is not to attack tourists, said Asier Basurto, a member of the 'tourism degrowth' platform that is organising a march in the Basque city of San Sebastián.
'People who go on vacation to one place or another are not our enemies, nor are they the target of our actions,' he said.
Let me be clear: our enemies are those who speculate on housing, who exploit workers, and those who are profiting handsomely from the touristification of our cities.
The seeds for the joint day of action were sown in April after groups from Spain, Italy, Portugal, and France gathered in Barcelona for a days-long conference under the umbrella of the Southern European Network Against Touristification.
María Cardona, of Let's Change Course, one of the groups behind Sunday's march in Ibiza said: 'Despite the distance between us, we're all grappling with a similar problem.'
In Ibiza, the march's slogan was 'the right to a dignified life', said Cardona.
'What does that mean when it comes to life on the island? There's the right to water — we're under restrictions, there's a drought, they've cut off all the public fountains.
'But villas, hotels, and luxury homes continue to fill their pools as if there were no water restrictions.'
People march past a beach during a demonstration against overtourism which affects the local population with inaccessible housing, among other things, in Puerto del Rosario, Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands. File picture: Europa Press/ AP
Underpinning the joint action was a semantic shift. Rather than overtourism, which suggests that the solution lies in rolling back the number of tourists, the focus was on touristification, highlighting how hotspots are increasingly becoming commodified to be consumed by visitors, said Manuel Martin, of the Movement for a Housing Referendum, one of the groups organising the Lisbon action.
'So it's a shift away from being a place that exists by and for the people that live and work there,' he added.
This has chipped away at the culture and social fabric of cities, added Martin, pointing to the shops and bookshops in Lisbon, some of them more than a century old, that have closed their doors after being priced out by rising rents.
'It sort of excavates meaning from a place and turns it into a Disneyfied version of what it really is.'
The Guardian
