We’ve looked at the incipient turismofobia, as a mixture of the usual dislike and enviousness shown towards the apparently wealthy foreign tourists, who sometimes appear to under-appreciate this wonderful country (and are -whoops!- sometimes sick in the garden).
But it’s a great business – they bring money – 13% of the GDP comes from the trippers – and in return, they go home again with empty pockets, a sun-burn and a hangover. Not a bad exchange, all in all.
Not that the trickle-down-system necessarily works in this case for everyone. Some areas get a lot of visitors, and others, of course, don’t. Some folk make some good money from tourism, and most of the rest of society – needless to say – doesn’t. Indeed, all they seem to get is the inconvenience.
The Canary and Balearics have it the worst, because one can only pack so many peas into a jar.
For the islanders, thanks to the huge number of visitors, there’s high demand for a dwelling, a lack of affordable homes on offer, ever-more tourist apartments (they pay better), more and more short-lets, shortages, queues and of course legions of guiris understandably out for a good time… bringing scary news items like ‘Lanzarote on brink of collapse as tourists overwhelm small island and exploit resources’, ‘Ibiza locals living in cars as party island sees rents soar’ and ‘Protesters in the Canary Islands on hunger strike over mass tourism’. And there’s nowhere to go, beyond living in a cave, a hut or a van, or the incredible bother of flying over, daily, from the mainland. We learn that if you really want a cheap place to sleep, then there’s always ‘The most surreal (and precarious) rentals offered in the Canary Islands, from shacks to mattresses in parked cars’.
Not that the problems of high-rents, scarcity and being pushed to the back don’t occur elsewhere. An article in El País is titled ‘A journey through Spain with the victims of voracious tourism: “I can't take it anymore”. Residents from Cádiz, Palma, San Sebastian or Tenerife explain how their lives have worsened due to the rise of tourist apartments, the filth in the streets and the collapse of public and private services’. In Barcelona, someone is telling the local radio, ‘in our block there are 33 ATs (tourist-lets), and there’s noise, dirt and vomit’. The plan is to build more short-term apartments – because they produce better income for the owners (which, as often as not, turns out to be a vulture-fund). One detail in the story is of a resident who saw 28 people come out of a tourist-apartment one morning (after an understandably noisy night). And because they are short-term – maybe just a day or two – they don’t care much if they break or trash something…
In my local tourist town, you can rent only until May, when the landlord will start looking for some Booking or AirBnb mini-breaks.
So where do you go until the low-season returns?
In Madrid, the national government talks of building more affordable apartment blocks, while threatening to clear out the worst barrios of an excess of ATs.
In metropolitan Valencia, there are twice as many tourist-lets as regular rentals.
In Seville, a local association complains about the bars and restaurants occupying the pavement with their ‘terrazas’, the endless special city-hall ‘events’ designed to bring in visitors (the current Feria de Abril), and of course, the tourist-apartments.
It can be annoying when hotels are allowed full swimming pools, but – due to water restrictions – residents living in community-blocks are in doubt. The good people of Málaga are not amused.
Maybe we could go swim at the hotels – it’s only fair…
Perhaps, say some visionaries, we could create a new tourist destination to ease the pressure on the current ones: a ‘New Ibiza’ in Cantabria.
Don’t laugh, they’ve already bought the land.
The BBC says that ‘Activists have begun a hunger strike on the island of Tenerife, in protest at what they see as the destructive growth of tourism on the Canary Islands. Protesters are calling for a halt to the construction of a hotel and a beach resort in the south of the island’.
The answers to all this are inevitably to curtail the number of short-term apartment lets and to build more housing to become available for residents. Furthermore, to raise hotel prices (more wealthier tourists, less cheap holidays); apply ‘eco-taxes’ in high density resorts, show some respect towards local residents (priority parking stickers as an obvious example) and – above all – relief of the 90/180 day rule – being those long term tourists who generally own their own home (and in six months will evidently be spending a lot more than the brief visit by a holiday-maker).
Short-term apartments are fine in a rural tourism setting, but not so much in the city.
A graffiti on a wall in Madrid: ‘Fuck BNB, save the Barrio’.
Right now, the season is only just starting…
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