More than 30 million people visited Barcelona last year. This is a number most tourism boards would kill for, but for Barcelona, it’s a big problem.
The city, which welcomes nearly as many visitors each month as it has residents, is facing a variety of challenges many of which are directly affected by unrestricted tourism.
Among them are rising property values and a stretched-to-the-max city infrastructure that is funded by locals but used to support tourists.
The rising property values says Barcelona’s mayor Ada Colau—the city’s first female mayor—were at the heart of the Spain’s financial crisis. Thousands of residents found they were no longer pay their mortgage or afford rent and many were evicted.
In fact, before politics, Colau was an anti-eviction activist who eventually ran for mayor on a platform that promised to crackdown on out-of-control visitor numbers.
Her campaign platform included promises to reduce visitor numbers put a hold on the development of new hotels and to increase tourism taxes.
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