I'm reading "European Anti-Tourism Groups Plan June 15 Disruptions/Driven by rising rents, crowds and what many see as neighborhood degradation, activists are calling to continue the kinds of protests that erupted last summer" (NYT)(free-access link).
You can't be squirting liquid at people. Your targets don't know that you don't mean harm. How do they know what liquid it is? But I get the message: People who are not making money through the tourist industry don't like their city crowded with tourists. The protesters do a good job of deterring the kind of tourists who, like me, don't want to bother the locals.
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The lack of electricity in Spain will keep tourists away.
Tourism will dry up within a few decades as Islam conquers these countries
“We don’t want to hurt anyone,” said Elena Boschi, an English-language teacher and activist from Genoa, Italy.
And an Italian in Spain is what, exactly, if not a tourist? Does she live in Barcelona permanently or what?
Oh, that's right. The Lefty Holier-Than-Thou never, ever have to follow any rules because they're the Righteous Among The Nations, doncha know!
We were thinking about a taking a cruise in the Med. I guess not. I'll let the nationalist isolationist be.
The Left doesn't want you to fly, doesn't want you drive more than 15 minutes within your city and doesn't want you to go on vacation. This is all in service to the CAGW scam, that is, we must achieve net zero by 2050 or the Earth burns up in 2100.
The Left hates life. The Left is a death cult. Just get drugged up on legal pot and hang out in your rented apartment. Do what Big Brother wants.
Legalizing pot is a big issue in NE. That's what the Dems want.
Dave Begley, what was your last trip abroad? Mine January in Spain and Morocco. Drove 20 minutes to work this morning from the house I own. Still waiting to try pot. Regardless, cult or not, I do expect to be dead by 2050.
Someone from Italy is lecturing us about tourism in Spain? Some people don’t have a very good feel for optics (or irony).
Barcelona (which my wife and I visited ~2022) has recently had a lot of anti-tourism activity. The same for Venice. As for traveling overseas, I did a lot on business during my career. After retirement and the birth of grandkids in London, travel these days is once or twice a year to London--than a sidetrip of three or four days in Europe for Grandpa and Grandma. I agree with our host that squirting water on people can be terrifying for some. Is that H20 or an acid attack?
The article concerns a Europe-wide gathering of anti-tourist activists in Spain. I suppose if they were serious they would conduct it remotely on that thing I have been hearing about, signal, and include a reporter.
“We don’t want to hurt anyone,” said Elena Boschi, an English-language teacher and activist from Genoa, Italy.
If I was a Spaniard whose living depended directly or indirectly on tourism I might wonder whether this Italian activist was hoping to shift tourists — and their dollars, euros, pounds sterling, or other hard currency — to her home country of Italy.
She doesn’t want to hurt anybody? How about certified tour guides, museum docents, food vendors, tour bus operators, restauranteurs, food servers, cruise port workers, etc., etc. ?
I hope their squirt guns are made out of chocolate, because if they squirt water on Americans, a few of them might be eating them.
Try that shit in Texas and see what happens... hell everyone is armed here.
I would be terrified that Kamala might emerge from whatever liquid is being squirted at me by these creeps.
Look, tourism really can be a pain for the locals. I lived in the Washington metro area from 1969 - 2016, and I used to curse trying to get to meetings downtown during the cherry blossom festival and when tourists were packing the mall and tour buses full of bored high school students were blocking Constitution Avenue. So I get it. But there is value in going to new places and learning new things, and there’s a question of fairness involved — should only New York City residents be able to see the Statue of Liberty? Should only Washington residents be able to see the displays in the Smithsonian?
Talk about Gaudi.
To be fair, Barcelona is too full of tourists. I don't mean me, of course, but those other people.
" a Europe-wide gathering of anti-tourist activists in Spain."
seems to be Very Like jetting across the globe, to protest global warming.
Of course, when they complain about "tourists"..
they Don't Mean people like themselves.. they mean; you know?
The Wrong Sort of people.
it's GOOD! and RIGHT! for the Right sort of people to travel..
you know? The RIGHT SORT
undocumented democrats..
the ultra rich..
European Marxists
you know?
And when there are no tourists the town will be poor and empty, and the people who live there will do whatever they have to do to escape to places where they can live a decent life.
Like, say, Texas and Florida.
Spain is a place where every young person can't wait to leave their little village and head for the bright lights of Madrid or Barcelona or Seville, leaving their aging parents to tend the farm or shop back home. Some towns in rural areas have been completely depopulated in the last generation or two. You can buy a whole village in Galicia, including the church and town hall, for 300,000 euros. It will be quite dilapidated and there will be no economic activity or job prospects in the vicinity, but if you are handy or can bring enough outside resources to finance a renovation, you can live in magnificent, scenic isolation for yourself and your twenty or thirty closest friends.
I will be in Bern, Switzerland, in September. The Swiss Transport Museum looked like something worth visiting, but the admission works out to $75 American. That should keep the riff-raff out.
It wasn't that long ago you could get the abandoned villages for free if you agreed to spend a certain amount of money renovating. This marvelously decayed ruin, right on a major river, looks like something out of Game of Thrones or LOTR:
https://www.spanishpropertyinsight.com/2013/10/14/get-abandoned-village-galicia-free-can-afford-refurbishment/
I don't think these deals still exist.
Difficult to put a percentage on it, but I'd guess we have visited less than 2% of what might be called attractions -- national parks, historical sites, cities, and so on -- here in the gool old U. S. of A. Plenty to see and do in our remaining years.
So it is okay to go to Barcelona from Genoa, but not from other places?
Don't know about Barcelona, but I have been to Venice. Very sad story as tourism drives up the value of the limited amount of land and historic preservation ensures that land can't be used efficiently. The native Venetians have mostly been bought out - some live on the farthest-flung islands such as the Lido, but for the most part they live in the mainland Veneto region and commute into the historic city to make crap wages. A lot of signs and graffiti say "VENETO STATO" ("[make a nation-] state of Veneto) because they are tired of all the foreigners, including non-Venetian Italians.
JSM
Hassayamper, ref buying abandoned European places: There's a cool British reality show called "Help, We Bought a Village!" that chronicles people doing exactly that.
JSM
I already planned to never visit Italy, so now I know to never reconsider that decision. Thanks for the heads up!
Or Spain. I'll stick to the USA.
Readering
I’m going to Istanbul in June!
To think, eight years, a islamic state cell was going to blow up the Sagrada Familia church, it was headed by an imam, with ties to a gitmo detainee, who had fooled the Spanish government into freeing him
Ah exchange rates and tourism. Tcrosse is going to be in Bern Switzerland in September. In the fall and winter of 1960-61 I was an American Field Service foreign exchange student going to school in Bern. At the time the US buck was worth 4 Swiss Francs. These days the Swiss Franc is worth $1.20. Things go up and down--both for business reasons over 30 years or so, and now visiting my American born daughter and grandkids, I've been to London a lot. I've been there when the pound as worth $2 US and when the pound was barely a dollar. I of course liked it better when a dollar and a bit of change would buy a pound. Daughter and son in law are paid in pounds--and when they visit us in Southern California they hit the stores and the tourist destinations and like it when the pound is closer to two dollars.
One tourist-related complaint that I can appreciate is the loss of housing for locals brought about by renting homes to tourists. It is a plague, and if it were up to me the whole industry would be illegal.
It has been said that the surest ways of destroying housing stock are rent control and carpet bombing. To these I would add AirBnB.
I would turn an apartment near the church into an Airbnb, charge a fortune or just enough to live anywhere in the world.
Elena Boschi, an English-language teacher and activist from Genoa, Italy is just as much a foreigner as the tourists from Cleveland.
Here's a report about the organizers of the protests:
"14 European cities, located mostly in Spain, have created a European network against mass tourism. The anti-tourism movement that rejects mass tourism is weaving a network to coordinate their actions and to condemn the excesses of activity in the cities.
Different organizations located in Barcelona, Venice, Malta, Málaga, Valencia, Palma and Lisbon, among other locations, have created the ‘SETNet’ network to put pressure on public administrations to change their tourism policies, as pointed out in their public statement.
Common Problems
The formal name of the platform is Network of Southern European Cities against Touristification, and in their initial statement, it says that their goal is to coerce governments to regulate tourism based on policies for social, economic and environmental sustainability."
IOW, radical left-wing activism. Their motivation is coercion.
Common Problems
The formal name of the platform is Network of Southern European Cities against Touristification, and in their initial statement, it says that their goal is to coerce governments to regulate tourism based on policies for social, economic and environmental sustainability."
IOW, radical left-wing activism. Their motivation is coercion.
National Socialist
Amusing that she is an English teacher. I don't know the laws in Spain, but here, if you block passage of a bus, cover the driver's view, and attack the trapped passengers, it is at least kidnapping if not terrorism.
If there were a DA with balls left in this country, which there is not.
Over-tourism is a problem. The solution is to tax the tourists and use that money to provide services for residents.
The solution to direct action mobs is to raise the cost for them with fines or a few days in jail.
You can't be squirting liquid at people.
Protest Bukakke
Dave Begly, you will love Istanbul. Ataturk really had the right idea.
Too many damn foreigners are destroying our cities……oh, wait.
What's really pissing people off is cruise ships. They pull into the harbor, thousands of people off-load, walk around for half a day, and then they leave.
While there, they transform the city, mostly for the worse, and they do very little for the local economy because they spend their money on the cruise, not the town they are stopping in.
Less of a problem, but still a problem, are Airbnb's that drive up rents, attract transitory people, and by pricing out the long-term residents, undermine the local businesses those residents would have patronized.
That could all be arranged. Between virtual reality and "Italoforming" a Chinese province Italy could be made a tourist desert.
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Spain is the second most visited country in the world after France (and before the US and China). Couldn't they just take a page from the French book and settle on hating the tourists and sneering at them behind their backs?
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How does the Euro affect all this? With different currencies, some Europeans would be less inclined to visit Spain when it wasn't a bargain. A common currency means that Spain won't be excluded as a vacation possibility.
Sounds like a Spain problem to me.
However, Are we supposed to condemn this person or support (the desire to drive off foreigners)?
I think that is somewhat common in high density tourist areas. Not just Europe. Hawaiians are not exactly welcoming to tourists if they do not explicitly rely on tourists for income. New York City springs to mind, as do NH and Vermont. Easy for me to be welcoming, I know, we do not get a ton of tourists, just enough to make the summers busier.
Why go where you are not wanted when an entire world of beautiful sights beckons?
Chris Arnade wrote about this: https://x.com/Chris_arnade/status/1916829248205082954
Hold off on Barcelona, Venice, et al for a few years until the anti-tourist furor dies down. In the meantime, there are thousands of absolute gems that are more than happy to have you visit.
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