Hotel staff in Barcelona were forced to confront anti-tourist protesters after they threw an orange flare into the reception area, as a demonstration in the Catalan capital turned ugly. Staff at Generator Barcelona, a design hotel-hostel near to the fashionable Paseo de Gracia, had to intervene and were seen shouting at the protesters to move away.
The demonstrators had surrounded the hotel and were holding placards claiming tourism was pricing them out of housing and robbing them of their futures. They also targeted unsuspecting holidaymakers with water pistols, as they marched through the city’s streets.
The activists shouted “Tourists Go Home” and “One More Tourist, One Less Local”, as well as “This tourism is terrorism.”
Police stepped in to stop them reaching the city’s famous Sagrada Familia and avoid clashes between the demonstrators and tourists visiting the Gaudi landmark.
Officials said only 600 people had taken part, although thousands are expected to support an anti-mass tourism rally in the Majorcan capital Palma later on Sunday.
Another march already took place on Sunday in the Basque city of San Sebastian, as part of a co-ordinated series of street protests in southern Europe against the problems activists say mass tourism causes.
Protests organisers in Palma are expecting a huge turnout to their rally, and say more than 90 organisations have signed up.
They argue that mass tourism has a serious environmental impact has led to an increase in housing prices, rents, and living costs.
The activists accuse the PP–VOX (right and radical right) coalition of pursuing “a devastating political agenda that serves only speculative and tourism-market interests, while completely ignoring the real needs of the people of Majorca.”
In a statement, the protest organisers Menys Turisme, Més Vida said: ““We will keep taking to the streets and showing up in the key spaces of the tourism model—events, institutional acts, and symbols of the tourism industry.
“If they won’t hear us in the streets, they will feel us in their daily lives.”
Yesterday members from the activist group held up a sightseeing bus in Palma.
Activists used smoke flares they placed around the bus and covered it with a large banner which said “Stop Touristification” in the unannounced action as sympathisers held up posters with the words ‘For The Right To A Decent Life’ printed on them.
A member of Menys Turisme Mes Vida gloated as he spoke into a microphone by the bus to say: “Today a sightseeing bus has been halted to denounce the touristification and commercialisation of our island and to invite everyone to tomorrow’s demonstration.”
