"Barcelona is dying"

When Asunción Blanco began researching tourism at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, it was 1996. At that time, if you wanted to see tourists in Barcelona, you had to go to La Pedrera, Camp Nou, or the Sagrada Família. Three decades later, Barcelona is not so much a city as a global brand, and tourists are everywhere. This means that while in 1996 Asunción was seen as a pioneer, because she was researching a world that was beginning to gain importance, today her work is at the center of the country's economic and social gravity.

"Really, the situation now is very different from when I started. To begin with, because the tourism phenomenon has skyrocketed, it hasn't stopped growing until it reached its current mass level, and there's no reason to think it won't continue to grow. At the same time, this enormous growth has generated problems that, starting with housing or competition for it, are increasingly questioning an economic model that until now was perceived as positive," she explains.

"We can't go against tourism," he reflects, "we have to be realistic. The tourism lobby is very strong, it has a lot of power, and it's not easy to confront it. In addition, there is that whole part of the population that earns a living thanks to tourism. But that doesn't mean that the industry doesn't need to be regulated. It cannot be an exception. Regulation must come from the state, because as an individual, the tourist is not to blame for the problems he or she generates; they go where they are allowed to go.

Blanco points to the housing crisis as the factor that has provoked that many people stop seeing tourism as a positive factor and have begun to see it as a negative reality. "The proposal of platforms like Airbnb is, on paper, interesting. The problem is mixing tourist apartments with private homes. It's obvious that this ends up creating a conflict. And it's one thing if the proportion of the housing stock dedicated to tourism is small, but another if it overflows, as has happened."

The consequence of all this, of the streets overflowing with tourists, of hardware stores closing to make way for ice cream parlors, of residents' homes becoming covert guesthouses, of markets where the goal is no longer to buy a kilo of apples but to take a selfie... is that the house is that "Barcelona is dying. Gentrification is killing it. At home, tourists may well be living frugally, but when they're on vacation they make an exception and spend like there is no tomorrow. This drives up the price of everything, from housing to services, and the result is that local residents end up being evicted from their home."

Blanco believes that the situation is deteriorating so rapidly that it's now starting to worry even in the tourism lobby itself. "The problem, however, is that the solution isn't simple," she points out. "In Barcelona, for example, we try to please everyone: businesspeople, tourists, residents, etc., but that's not always possible because we want different models of how a city should be." Despite the difficulties, the researcher considers herself a "hopeful pessimist." "I want to think it's possible to reverse some of the ills that tourism has generated, especially in terms of housing. We still have some space to change course," she says, although she sounds cautions: "I don't know if those in power are willing to take up this challenge."