Ferðast tú í evropeiskum stórbýum, so hevur tú verið í Barcelona við katalansku miðjarðarhavsstrondina. Ikki minst tí, at Atlantsflog flýgur beinleiðis hagar.
Her er slóð til ein blogg, eg skrivaði haðani fyri tíggju árum síðan undir yvirskriftini Skal ferðavinnan oyðileggja besta býin?
Tá rendi eg meg í ógvusligar mótmælisgongur, har lokal fastbúgvandi fólk, ikki funnu seg í at teirra íbúðir skuldu brúkast til ferðafólk. Brúkið hotellini og ikki okkara livandi miðbý, har vit hava okkara heim og bústað, var herrópið. Mótmælisfólkini endaðu við dreglum í túninum hjá borgarstjóranum.
Um dagarnar varnaðist eg, at José Antonio Donaire Benito, 57, sum hevur drúgva akademiska granskingarbakgrund í ferðavinnu, er fyrsti stjóri, sum sami býur, Barcelona, hevur sett í starv sum comissionat de turisme, at stýra ferðavinnustreyminum har í býnum, og fáa endurreist Barcelona við at loysa býin frá risastóra ferðafólkastreyminum, á enskum rópt overtourism.
Tað er ein nýggj
politisk og umsitingarlig uppgáva og málsetningur, sum býráðið hevur sett á
stovn, at fáa tamarhald á ferðavinnuni.
Samstundi sum eg havi sett Google Translate ovast á breddan á blogginum, loyvi eg mær at endurgeva prátið okkara millum á enskum, so sum tað var.
- I have read your interesting thoughts on tourism, one of
the key issues on my mostly traveling blog in the Faroese language. Hope it is
okay to give you some questions on tourism from your city and point of view. Why
do you say that in your city Barcelona you have reached the limit for tourism?
How do you measure that?
Thank you for reaching out this way and let me say before
anything else: the fact that you write about tourism in Faroese matters to me
more than you might expect. One of the arguments we make in Barcelona is that
tourism policy is ultimately a question of cultural survival - of whether a
city, a neighbourhood, or a linguistic community retains the conditions
necessary to reproduce itself. The Faroe Islands, with a living language spoken
by fewer than 80,000 people and a territory that has had to think carefully
about what kind of visitors it wants and on what terms, understands this
tension in ways that many larger destinations have not yet grasped. So no, it
is not just "okay" to ask — it is exactly the kind of conversation I
find most valuable.
On your first question. We do not use the phrase
"reached the limit" in an absolute or arithmetical sense - that
framing would be both analytically imprecise and politically misleading. What
we argue is that in specific neighbourhoods and at specific moments, the growth
of tourist activity has exceeded the adaptive capacity of the urban system
across several interconnected dimensions. In the housing market, short-term
rental platforms have structurally displaced long-term residents, particularly
in the historic centre and the Eixample, eroding the socioeconomic diversity
that defines a living city. In public space, the daily rhythm of streets like
La Rambla or the Gòtic quarter has been progressively reorganized around
visitor flows rather than resident life. And in ecological terms - water
consumption, waste generation, noise - the cumulative footprint of 32 million
annual overnight visitors in a Mediterranean city with structural water stress
is not a secondary consideration.
We measure this through a framework we call the Límit de
Canvi Acceptable - the Limit of Acceptable Change - which combines quantitative
indicators from Barcelona's Tourism Observatory (OTB) with qualitative
assessments of resident well-being, territorial equity, and cultural
continuity. The core analytical question is not how many tourists the city can
physically absorb, but at what point growth generates costs -economic, social,
cultural - that fall disproportionately on residents who derive little or no
benefit from it. That asymmetry is what we are trying to correct.
- In your mind's eye, how do you see for you the effect of
stopping the growing number of tourists in Barcelona? What is the ultimate
success criteria of such a plan or operation?
The goal is not to stop tourist flows, and it would be both
unrealistic and counterproductive to frame it that way. Barcelona is a
Mediterranean city, a cultural capital, and a significant node in the European
economy - visitors are part of its reality and, managed well, part of its
vitality. What we are trying to do is rebalance the relationship between
tourism and the city's primary function: to be a place where people live, work,
study, and age with dignity.
Success, for us, is not measured in arrival statistics. It
looks like this: a housing market where a teacher, a nurse, or a young family
can afford to rent in a central neighbourhood without being pushed to the
metropolitan periphery; public spaces that serve both residents and visitors
without one systematically displacing the other; a tourist tax - the IEET, with
its municipal surcharge - whose revenue is reinvested in the communities that
bear the real costs of overtourism; and a cruise terminal that has been reduced
from seven to five operational berths as a deliberate signal that not all
tourist products are equally compatible with urban quality of life. The metric
is ultimately the quality of daily life of the 1.6 million people who live here
throughout the year, not the satisfaction scores of the 32 million who pass
through.
- What is the most memorable place to experience, when
visiting Barcelona this summer?
I would resist the invitation to give you a single
"most memorable place" - that logic is precisely the mechanism that
concentrates pressure on a handful of iconic sites and leaves the rest of the
city underexplored and overloaded simultaneously. What I would suggest instead
is to follow Barcelona's inhabited geography: the Eixample on a weekday
morning, when the city belongs to the people who live in it; the Poblenou
waterfront away from the Olympic port, where industrial memory and new urban
life coexist; the Montjuïc gardens at dusk, with the city below and almost no
one around. And if you are genuinely curious about how a city navigates the
tension between welcome and self-preservation - speak to people in their own
language, or at least try. Barcelona is most itself when it is not performing
for visitors, and the same is almost certainly true of the Faroe Islands.
With kind regards and genuine interest in what you write
Thanks for much appreciated words on tourism from Barcelona!
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