Barcelona

Barcelona has a similar problem to that of the Canary Islands. Abend (2026) discussed what its new Commissioner for Sustainable Tourism was planning to do to address its overtourism. This included:

• Make Barcelona attractive to locals again, for example by ensuring the Boqueria market remained a market for local people rather than becoming touristified by being focused on providing pre-prepared food for tourists.
• Continue to prevent new hotel construction (this was stopped in 2017).
• Having a maximum 16 million tourists – and ‘not one tourist more’ - with the make up of 1/3 business tourists, 1/3 cultural tourists and 1/3 leisure tourists (currently 2/3 are leisure tourists) and no day-tripper tourists from cruise ships with tourist taxes increased substantially to dissuade this.
• Make sure services that locals use are subsidized by tourist tax (including sewerage, security, power and transportation). Hotels also use a lot of water (especially in guestrooms, washing linens and having swimming pools) which can limit water availability – and raise costs – for local people.
• Give targeted support to shops that provide things for local people such as hardware stores.
• No new tourist infrastructure or touristification of existing infrastructure.

Overtourism is a comparatively recent phenomenon for Barcelona. Until it hosted the 1992 Olympic Games it was a rundown port town. Leading up to the Games, the government improved the centre so 2 miles (3.2km) of beach was built, palm trees imported, ring roads built and parks and green spaces overhauled as well as advertising campaigns beginning to encourage people to visit. Tourism has steadily increased from around 1.2 million people in 1990 to just over 26 million people in 2025. Barcelona has a population of only around 1.7 million in the city, which is where the majority of tourists go. The key message from the Commissioner for Sustainable Tourism is that he is trying to achieve a balance between tourism and the needs of the local population to enable both tourism and liveability. Barcelona has attracted lots of attention because of overtourism with even the Mayor of Athens in Greece commenting; ‘we must not become Barcelona’ (Touchtidou, 2026).