"Barcelona is dying on us"

When Asunción Blanco began researching tourism at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​it was 1996. At that time, to see tourists in Barcelona, ​​you had to go to La Pedrera, Camp Nou, or the Sagrada Família. Three decades later, it's no longer a city but 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 earlier with housing or competition for it, are increasingly questioning an economic model that until now was viewed positively," 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 is professionally dedicated, that earns a living. But that doesn't mean that they don't have to regulate. It may be an exception. Regulation must come from public authorities, because as individuals, the tourist is in no way to blame for the problems they generate; they go where they are allowed to go.

Blanco points to the housing crisis as the factor that has caused many people to 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 evident that this ends up causing a conflict of coexistence. And it's one thing for the proportion of the housing stock dedicated to tourism to be small, and another for it to overflow, 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 in trouble. Perhaps frugally, but when they're on vacation they make an exception and pull the trigger. This drives up the price of everything, of housing, of services, and the result is that the resident ends 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," he 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 city models." Despite the difficulties, the researcher presents herself as 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 room to grow," she says, although she cautions: "I don't know if those who govern us are willing to take up this challenge."