An early evening in summer, outside Barcelona’s Josep Tarradellas airport. Hundreds of people are queuing for taxis – huge suitcases, sunglasses, baseball caps. A woman with a small carry-on gets into a cab and smiles at the driver.
When she says, “Hey, bona tarda. To Universitat, gràcies,” he looks surprised. “Oh wow, not only Spanish… Catalan, for real? First one I’ve taken today,” he says. “The airport has been spitting tourists out all day like crazy.”
This is just a small, 100% true, example of what it means to be an alien in your own city. And it goes some way to explaining those videos you have probably seen showing some really angry Barcelona locals spraying tourists with water pistols.
The reason was not that in a city with excellent food, they had made the criminal gastronomic choice of eating at a lousy taco chain. It was a protest against mass tourism and how it is affecting our daily lives.
In fact, how it is making our hometown not liveable any more. There are the “I-wanna-kill-myself-when-I-see-the-price” apartments. And there is the fact that fishmongers or hardware stores or cobblers are now as rare to spot as a Catalan person taking a taxi at our capital’s airport.
The social media debate, as usual, has been intellectually comparable to toddlers arguing over a broken toy: “Ha! You colonised Latin America 500 years ago, how does it feel to be colonised now, huh?” “I am from the USA, if I got sprayed with a water pistol I would show you what a real gun looks like”. “Why don’t you attack the owners of those Airbnbs instead of bothering innocent tourists?”
One of every four apartments in Barcelona is now owned by a large property holder – someone who owns at least four properties and, you might reasonably say, with their only goal being to make a stupid amount of money. Just 2% of all the city’s property owners own an incredible 184,111 of Barcelona’s 794,272 residences.
Believe me, if we knew who these people were we might pack something other than a water pistol. But we don’t know, so we just make noise.
We do try to make politicians accountable for this mess, but it is not as if local elections are bringing the issue to the world’s attention. Instead, it’s a few water pistols that have resulted in videos being shared all over the world.
And that was precisely the goal of our protests, like the one held just a few weeks ago against a massive Louis Vuitton event at Park Güell that meant privatising a public space – a Unesco World Heritage site, one that on top of everything else turns out to have been severely damaged due to the carelessness of the event organisers. We continue making noise because we need to be heard.
The goal is for tourists is to try to educate themselves, to be aware that this is a city that is reaching its limit, to understand that their crazy loud party today is our ruined work day tomorrow, and to know that their presence has an effect on a place that their T-shirts claim to love, but their actions say otherwise.
It is surprising, or maybe not, that local areas have decided to take a faltering step with a poster campaign, which – in English, of course – asks people not to be loud at night, not to throw litter, to show respect. Basic common stuff that seems to be forgotten way too often when people are not in their hometowns.
Something much more significant is the announcement by the mayor, Jaume Collboni, that he won’t renew the licences of the 10,000 apartments that are currently rented to tourists when they expire in November 2028, but citizens are sceptical about how and if this is going to happen at all.
But while we wait, we won’t be able to drive to Barceloneta – a once-beloved neighbourhood gone horribly wrong due to gentrification – during the America’s Cup, which begins next month. So in the meantime, we take action: things like deleting a local bus route from Google Maps so tourists can’t find it to get to the above-mentioned Park Güell.
And if we are so threatened by water shortages that we can’t take a shower at the gym, but tourists can still enjoy their pools, we will sacrifice the little water we have left to make political weapons out of spray pistols.
You took Cucurella and his massive hair, you took Guardiola, heck, you almost beat us in the football. Do you think we could, at least, please get our city back?
Marta Pallarès is a music journalist from Barcelona
