Imagine you save thousands of dollars to go on a family vacation to Barcelona. You look forward to seeing the Sagrada Familia Cathedral, trying delicious food, and enjoying the fabulous Catalan climate and local hospitality.

After arriving, your family gets mugged twice in the space of a week; you're surrounded by trash and crowds of drunk Brits and obnoxiously loud Americans for the whole trip. There are Spanish people on the streets too, thousands of them; they're chanting "Fuck you, tourists" and "Tourists go home!". Most of the restaurants are tourist traps.

You decide to sit down in one anyway, but just after getting the menus, locals start soaking you with water pistols and shouting about how you're ruining their lives and that you're not welcome there. Your kids are crying, your partner is confused and worried. Eventually, when the protestors pass, you head back to your hotel, only to find that the protestors are there now, that they've taped up the entrance, and they're shouting "We'll never be able to afford houses because of you, tourist scum."

Welcome to Spain in 2024 — and to Italy, Portugal, Croatia, Czechia and the Netherlands in 2025. Don't forget to leave a review.

Some tourists have been shocked that tens of thousands have taken to the streets to un-welcome them, but the mass protests in Spain over the past year (in the Canary Islands, Barcelona, Málaga, Majorca and Menorca) were utterly predictable to anyone paying attention over the past few years. The explosion of "revenge travel" after Covid lockdowns never really diminished to reasonable levels, in large part due to the strength of the dollar against the euro.

Tourism at moderate levels is a good thing, and has always been part of the human experience, from medieval pilgrims to the modern package holiday. But there is such a thing as too much tourism, and many European destinations are experiencing the consequences now: higher prices, more congestion, the impossibility of finding accommodation, lack of essential services, Disneyfication, crime, and the difficulty of replacing it with a real economy.

Some of these problems are eternal, and locals historically managed to accept them. Generations of Greek islanders have dealt with clueless tourists bumping into them or interrupting their commute to ask for directions, and they stoically tolerated it as part of a compromise: the tourists are a bit annoying during summer, but we have more shops open because of the business, and some locals can take the winter off work. Not a bad deal, all things considered.

But increasingly, the deal is worse.

There used to be a meaningful difference between where tourists stayed (hotels, B&Bs) and where locals stayed (houses, apartments). The rise of platforms like Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo, and hotels themselves opening more apartments, has erased that difference.

It also used to be the case that more tourists = more shops. Yet today, it means the opposite; the rise of ultra-low-cost airlines like Ryanair, and the availability of cheap on-demand manufacturing from China, have created a Golden Age of Souvenirs around the world, which unfortunately corresponds to a Dark Age of Buying Useful Things Like Electronics or Groceries.

A local grocery shop selling milk for €1.14/liter simply can't compete with a souvenir shop selling an "I 🧡RFlorence" T-shirt (Made in Bangladesh) for €20, so the tourists get their T-shirts, and the locals get a 25-minute walk to buy milk.

Yes, we know — "ThE lOcAlS wOuLd Be StArViNg WiThOuT oUr ToUrIsT dOllArS!"

But actually no, they wouldn't. The locals were not starving to death in Florence or Amsterdam before Ryanair and Airbnb, and they would not starve to death without them. About 6% of the EU workforce works in tourism, rising to about 10–12% in cities like Barcelona, Amsterdam and Prague; if losing those jobs is the cost of having a city without pickpockets, high prices and overcrowded metros, then it's a price many are willing to pay.

There's also the cultural dimension to consider. When I was growing up, the stereotypical bad tourist was the"Ugly American": an overweight man in cargo shorts, sunglasses and a baseball cap who visited Rome to dine exclusively in McDonald's and complain loudly about Ay-rabs, boasting about his Italian heritage while complaining that nobody spoke English.

He's still around, but he's been joined by somebody I like to call "California Candice": a blue-haired college girl in Lisbon who eats €12 smashed avocado on wholegrain, gluten-free, vegan rye bread from cafés with umbrella ceilings, complains loudly about Trump and how the US is a 3rd-world country because the minimum wage is $7.25/hour (her waiter earns $5.25/hour).

Thanks to the strong dollar, she's staying at a €150/night Airbnb and considers it worth every penny because she got a cute TikTok of it. Her waiter still lives with his parents at age 35 because the average rent is double his wage. And for every hipster café that opens, a good local one closes its doors.

Americans make for good stereotypes because they're loud, but I'll lay off them for a moment to acknowledge that the problem is much wider: Australians, Brits, Dutch, Germans, Scandinavians, Chinese, Russians. Actually, Northern European city-breakers and digital nomads might be even more problematic.

And gentrification, globalization, and Disneyfication aren't the problem of any one nation, but of mass tourists generally. Too many people visit Barcelona or Lisbon not out of any profound interest in Catalan or Portuguese culture, but for these reasons instead:

• the cities were on lots of lists of "Top 10 European City Breaks", and the tourists felt desperate to tick it off a bucket list
• the flights were cheap
• they wanted somewhere pretty to put on their Instagram

This problem wouldn't be as severe if tourists were a little bit more conscientious about where they visited (no, you don't have to see Prague or Barcelona before you die. Go somewhere you're wanted instead).

However, it's true that the problems could also be fixed by governments getting a grip on the situation — introducing tourist quotas, banning cruises, restricting tourism business licenses, etc. The fact that Venice (with 49,000 people living in the historic centre) gets over 20 million visitors per year is more a failing of airlines, port authorities and politicians than of any individual tourist.

In Venice itself, this has led to the city becoming a glorified theme park as locals have fled the high prices and poor quality of life to live in neighbouring towns. But the events in Spain this year suggest that not all locals in Europe's tourist spots will leave so quietly. And until people realize that there is such a thing as overtourism, things will continue to get worse. This year, it was water pistols; next year, it could be rocks.