The yawning gap between locals’ and visitors’ consumption is stoking long-standing resentments ahead of an election.
As rain poured into Catalonia’s parched capital, the tourists did, too.
Yet while a damp April brought some relief to the drought-stricken Spanish region — which has been living under rain-starved skies for over three years — the crescendoing tourist season did not.
After all, spring is when visitors start spilling into Barcelona’s streets each morning from cruise ships, hotels and Airbnbs — and consuming considerably more of the city’s water than the average resident, threatening to push Barcelona’s water supply to the breaking point.
The disconnect has locals fulminating. While Catalan municipalities have faced water consumption limits since the region declared a drought emergency in early February, the tourism sector has largely escaped restrictions.
I’m visiting Spain for the first time right now and the amount of wah-wah “tourism bad go home!” crybaby graffiti and signs are huge. Do you want the tourism industry’s money but none of the tourists? Huh?
Has it occurred you that they do not want it at all? Tourism money is not a blessing. It results in terrible jobs that pay miserably and prevents better jobs from appearing as the living costs skyrocket.
Tourist season begins and boom, surge of 110% minimum-wage jobs. 6 months later, everyone is fired and invited to live 6 more months off the sun. People are pretty fed up with this new form of bellow-minimum-wage slavery you can’t possibly imagine.
Source: Engineer who lives in Lisbon and does not need to submit to it but still needs to pay 150% minimum wage for rent. There isn’t a single person besides bribed politicians and tourism-related business owners who wants this.
I live in a very, very touristy area. I just accept that I live somewhere other people want to see, and there’s real consequences to that. The consequences are significant. Traffic, crowding, high prices, shitty restaurants, etc. There are benefits though. And not all tourist jobs are bad. Yeah they’re not engineering jobs, but to the people who live off those jobs they are happy they exist. It’s easy for someone who is privileged to say no one wants those jobs.
How can people be happy about the massification of tourists when they went from any job paying for a flat to almost no job paying for one?
At least in Portugal this was not a one-generation-something-years kind of thing. It took like 10-15 years to go from anyone can afford a flat to almost nobody can.
