Barcelona to Introduce Law for Curbing Tourism

The city of Barcelona is expected to introduce a law to curb tourism, as visitors have begun to overwhelm the city and anger local residents.

Last year the city’s 1.6 million residents were heavily outnumbered by an estimated 32 million visitors, about half of them day-trippers, The Guardian reported.

The new law comes after more than 25 years of relentless promotion of the city as a tourist destination, and coincides with a planned “occupation” on Saturday of La Rambla, a street that has come to symbolize what many view as the excessive and unsustainable number of tourists.

The event has been organized by SOS Barcelona, an umbrella group for some 40 residents and community associations.

Under the slogan “Barcelona isn’t for sale”, the protesters are calling for an end to property speculation, which is pricing residents out of the city, and to low-wage jobs in tourist service industries.

“The tourist and restaurant sector is the worst paid in Barcelona,” says Marti Cuso, a member of the group. “They earn half the average salary.”

The new law, known as the special urban plan for tourist accommodation, seeks to limit the number of beds on offer from hotels and tourist apartments. It imposes a moratorium on building new hotels and a halt in issuing licenses for tourist apartments.

However, as a number of projects are already in the pipeline, the plan is not expected to have an impact before 2019.

There are currently 75,000 hotel beds in the city and about 50,000 beds in legal tourist apartments, plus an estimated 50,000 illegal ones. Residents’ associations calculate that some 17,000 flats are now tourist apartments and that the resulting shortage has driven up rents that are now the highest in Spain.

The proposal has met fierce opposition from the tourism industry, which claims the law demonizes tourists and maintains that limiting growth can only hurt an already weak economy in a city where tourism accounts for about 12% of the city’s €72 billion GDP.