In the town of Sintra, a suburb of Lisbon, some strongly-worded graffiti greets travellers like me. It reads: ‘F**k you tourist scum’. Locals have mounted a campaign fighting against the scourge of ‘mass tourism’. According to residents’ group QSintra, ‘Enough is enough!’ The time has apparently come for the state to intervene and bring about: ‘A revitalisation of the community and quality of life for residents; greater care and discretion in urban planning and management; quality tourism, not quantity’.
Alienating millions of travellers who boost your prosperity each year seems like economic seppuku
This kind of sentiment isn’t only amusing fodder for a photo-op, or limited to Portugal; it’s part of an anti-tourist backlash sweeping the continent. In a number of European states, tourist-bashing is all the rage.
In Barcelona, anti-tourist sentiment has been particularly robust. Earlier this month, hordes of angry Spaniards marched through the city carrying banners reading ‘Tourism kills the city’; a few particularly sadistic locals encouraged some visitors to jump from their balconies. The really nasty part came when protestors soaked unsuspecting holiday goers with water guns while they ate at restaurants.
The irrationality of this behaviour is perplexing. You don’t have to be an economist to realise that tourism is vital for Portugal and Spain’s economies.
Despite a number of working-age people ruining foreigners’ holidays instead of going to the office, Spain’s economy has been doing pretty well recently. It has been growing faster than most of its European neighbours – a trend due, in no small part, to its tourism industry, which contributes about 12 per cent to Spain’s GDP.
Portugal, whose economy is not in nearly as rosy a state as Spain’s, also reaps the benefits of tourism. Last year saw a record rise in visitors, which contributed €52 billion (£43 billion) to the economy, 19.6 per cent of the nation’s entire output. Bear in mind that this is a country with a GDP of just €240 billion (£200 billion).
For countries like Spain and Portugal, which are reliant on tourism, alienating millions of travellers who boost your prosperity each year seems like economic seppuku.
Regardless, people are angry and there are grievances that need addressing. A common refrain from discontented locals is that tourism and second home ownership have made the cost of living crisis worse, particularly when it comes to house prices.
Sound familiar? In Cornwall, residents have long been furious that people buy second homes there, don’t live in them for most of the year and supposedly push up prices. To deal with this, the Tories announced measures punishing second home owners and incentivising them to sell. Towns such as St Ives also voted to ban the sale of new properties to second home buyers. This has all backfired spectacularly. Not only are second home purchases down, but Cornwall’s housing crisis has got worse. Rents have gone up and house building in the region has decreased.
The situation in Spain and Portugal is almost identical. Construction isn’t keeping pace with demand in either country. In Portugal, house prices increased by 10 per cent last year compared to 2022. In Lisbon, there is a housing deficit of 300,000 homes, which has caused prices to skyrocket. One of the few factors still keeping the Portuguese market buoyant are the large number of Britons and Americans choosing to retire there.
In Spain, a shortage of so-called ‘buildable land’ has stifled developers’ ability to get projects off the ground, squashing supply. Unsurprisingly, this is felt most acutely in urban areas with growing populations, such as Barcelona.
The reasons for these shortages are the same as those causing the housing crisis across the UK: a historic unwillingness to reform archaic planning laws and start building. In Blighty, Yimbys were sufficiently noisy to push the new government into making progress on this. Perhaps if the water gun firing protestors of Iberia actually looked at the root cause of their problems and did the same, they would get similar results.
As the economist Thomas Sowell once said, ‘there are no solutions, only trade-offs’. Anti-tourism agitators ought to consider this. Granted, tourists (particularly us Britons) can be annoying at times, perhaps even intolerable when we land on the continent. But kicking out vast swathes of tourists risks serious damage to a crucially important sector. Thankfully, there is an alternative: stop blaming tourists and start building houses. Creating an environment where enough infrastructure is built to sustain local needs as well those of much-needed visitors could prove the happy medium our European cousins – and those in Cornwall – are after.
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