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.
It took like 10-15 years to go from anyone can afford a flat to almost nobody can.
It’s as if nothing could be done about it. One country blames tourists, others immigrants. In Netherlands the most popular party said for ages that it’s useless to plan ahead. Such remarks are ignored. People go for the populist remarks. Blame some group of people.
I don’t think you’re envisioning physics in many of these situations. Might not be the case in Barcelona which is pretty big and growable but let me give you another example to point out why that generalization doesn’t stick. I’m from nearby Sesimbra, a 5k pop village in a very very cool-looking place.
If I had to bet, Sesimbra receives like 50k tourists a month, many of which want to stay in hotels and tents and illegal caravans. If one expands Sesimbra, the beauty of the place gets destroyed for everyone. If one does not, the fisherman (yes, it is a fishing village) are now competing with 50k other fellas for land, in a village that can’t sustain any other industry.
Even if you tax the hell of tourists and only a fifth keeps going, that is already too many. It literally is destroying both the nature and the livelihood of people that were there for centuries.
I get the idea that people want to see fancy places and we don’t have that many Sesimbras in the world, but this massification is basically forbidding people from living anywhere that happens to be pretty and has a good weather. The richer tourists stay in the hotels (which lay on top of bulldozed homes) and the locals are now 20km away because physics couldn’t care less. 50k ain’t gonna stay in that tiny valley, people do not fit.
We have huge chunks of the coastal dunes destroyed (and those take a long time to recover) because of such misuse and overuse. Everyone wants to go to the beach and everyone wants to have resorts or whatever, and yet the places and the populations are taking very hard beatings. No amount of policy making solves some of those situations given that you can’t just have quotas of people allowed to visit a city within the EU. The entire region of Algarve is a disaster.
And yes, there are airports with tourist taxes, but Portugal doesn’t have all that many airports. These villages (Sesimbra, Sintra, Ericeira…) are serviced by the same airport as Lisbon. Can’t hit tourists with a tax without hitting businesses and others.
It’s like one edgy dude. All the font is exactly the same for 90% of those. ‘Go Home Tourist’ is basically his graffiti name. News agencies, tourists, and social media posters love it though.
i don’t think it’s unfair to want sustainable tourism, it isn’t either do or dont, there are many ways to do it. think airbnb and rising housing costs: residents may want to have customers AND buy a home in their city
They used a lot of words to say that it’s recently rained in Barcelona and the tourist season is beginning. Then they said tourists use more water than residents, with absolutely no indication of how that may be the case.
Then the article just… Stopped.
Did we read different articles or something? They provide numbers about how much regular residents use compared to hotel guests, and explain why that may be the case (lack of regulation/limits in the tourism sector). It even has a small section on how the issue could be handled.
Did you perhaps just read the small paragraph that gets added to the post on lemmy?
Did you perhaps just read the small paragraph that gets added to the post on lemmy?
To be honest, yeah. I’m used to that having full articles to save me from the ad infestations of so many news sites out there that I didn’t bother clicking into it. Plus it was a bit early for me when I was giving my daughter an overnight bottle so I was in a state of foggy annoyance.
I’m used to that having full articles
Quite a lot of communities ban posting of full articles, including this one:
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post.
Fair enough, it happens to the best of us. I did notice that sometimes the preview on lemmy has the full article, but usually it only has some kind of TL;DR. Which is good enough to get the gist of things most of the time, but not always.
I recommend firefox and it’s reader mode, makes most sites with articles much more bearable.
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Even the preview mentions pools.
I feel bad but on the other hand this is the second, “No tourists only tourist money please” article I’ve seen. I saw another one from Spain where a bus that goes to the top of a hill had to be hidden from Google maps so locals could get more availability for seating.
Exactly. If tourists are a problem, close down tourist attractions. We’ll wait.
I feel for the locals, the casino is just a terrible idea and the fact that residents are being pushed out by airbnb and high rents really sucks for them.
My city banned Airbnb and VRBO, and actually successfully made it not a thing here. Not sure why Barcelona cannot also. The water usage issue seems easy to fix, or not really the issue at all.
It’s probably a bit more complicated than that… a city that relies so much on tourism economically can’t just start banning one of the main ways tourists stay there.
A lot of trickle down economics fans in this thread.
Can you highlight the comments that say we should be giving money to rich people?
The disconnect has locals fulminating.
What?
Word hard, Unga knows.
Average water consumption stats make my head spin. According to the article, Barcelona residents use an average 99 liters per person per day. 0_0 I know the residential averages in America are even more horrific, something like 50 to 150 gallons PPPD, depending on locale.
What the hell is everyone doing with all of that water?! My partner and I use 4.5 gallons PPPD. And it’s that high because we hand wash our dishes (no place to put a dishwasher).
My partner and I use 4.5 gallons PPPD.
Do you really count everything? This seems awfully low.
Yes, we live on a ocean-going sailboat, so we have tight metrics on consumption rates for everything. The 4.5 number comes from our average monthly consumption.
Irrigating lawns is where that residential water goes. It’s fucking insane how much water a lawn needs.
Grass is the largest irrigated crop in the US
The thing about averages is that the distribution is rarely equal across the spectrum. Usually it’s a spike on the high and low ends. Kevin showers after he shits while Dave changes out his pool water a couple of times a year to make sure it gets cleaned extra well.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
If the government relaxes drought restrictions, municipalities’ allowance would rise to 230 liters per person per day, while mandatory reductions for agriculture, livestock and industry would ease slightly.
Bonet — a member of the opposition Catalan Socialists — said the city hadn’t been consulted about the new plant and suggested the government was simply trying to mask years of inaction ahead of the regional election.
Regional budget negotiations collapsed in March when one party made its support conditional on the government freezing a casino-hotel megaproject near Tarragona, south of Barcelona.
Carrera’s favored option: Gigantic basins near the city that would capture water during periods of intense rainfall and let the ground slowly absorb it, thus recharging parched aquifers.
At the same time, they’ve insisted that tourists shouldn’t stay away and allowed swimming pools to be filled as long as they’re classified as a “climate refuge” to escape the heat.
The original article contains 1,894 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 91%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I use hotel water for 2 things when I travel; showers and toilets. The 2 or 3 liters I drink is nothing compared to those. But I imagine Americans and others from areas where water isn’t restricted take much longer showers and we have a habit of leaving the tap running while we do stuff like wash something or brush our teeth. That being said I’m heading to Barcelona in fall and I’ll try to be mindful of my water usage
