It’s well past the August holiday peak, but anger against over-tourism in Spain is spilling into the off-season, as holiday-makers continue to seek winter sun.
On Sunday locals in the Basque city of San Sebastian plan to take to the streets under the banner: “We are in danger; degrow tourism!”
And in November anti-tourism protesters will gather in Seville.
Thousands turned out last Sunday in the Canary Islands, so the problem is clearly not going away.
Is not the tourists or their views on how the local live, is locals being displaced from their own city and way of living by a bunch of Instaexperiences and impersonation of what is authentic of the region.
None of these articles talk about the difference in income across north and south Europe where northerners and people from the US can go and hoard apartments bars and city areas outcasting locals with high prices.
Also, those people who go and buy properties in Southern Europe are often older and don’t learn the local language or integrate at all. Instead, they create segregated communities with their own English speaking cafés and restaurants that disrupt the normal fabric of the country.
English/Russian/Dutch speaking btw
Lots of reference to “tourist apartments” in there. Are we talking about people and companies buying up residential properties and turning them into short-term rentals (AirBnB)? Because definitely fuck that.
It is that, but it’s not just that. Whole regions are becoming so dedicated to tourism that investment is going to little else, which doesn’t really create a lot of well paying jobs for the young people. In fact, tourism only pays well to business owners. For everyone else, it’s an incredibly precarious job where you make money sometimes and other times you don’t. Even when you do, tourism is considered unskilled labor for teens and young adults without degrees, mostly. It’s a major cause of low fertility, I’d wager, since poor young people make no kids.
Everything becomes a sort of resort, with businesses catering mostly to tourists, with business owners feeling even apathetic about serving locals, as they pay less and don’t tip. The same is happening in several regions in southern Portugal. A resortification, if you will, of entire regions.
It’s like the whole world designated that country as a holiday country because of the weather and beauty, but the locals also want high paying tech jobs and factories. The government is making too much bank to change it and business owners are making a lot of pressure not to.
Maybe Spain is fine with tourists but tired of the British?
I’ll be the first to admit that some British people are awful when they go abroad, but let’s not label entire countries based on the actions of a few.
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