Last month, thousands of residents took to the streets in Barcelona to protest against mass tourism and its consequences.
“Enough! Let’s set limits to tourism!” were among the many slogans emblazoned on placards. Some were even more blunt: “Tourists go home. You are not welcome.” The captions were conveniently in English, so there wouldn’t be a language barrier in driving the message home to their target audience.
There are similar sentiments in other Spanish tourist destinations, from Málaga to Majorca, with residents even squirting tourists with water guns to express their frustration and anger. In Spain, the tourism industry has caused a rise in real estate prices, environmental pollution, parking problems, traffic congestion and water shortage.
In Barcelona, as more and more apartments have been converted into vacation homes, rents have risen by 68% over the past decade, pricing residents out of the housing market. The housing shortage is at the heart of the protests in Málaga. “One more tourist, one neighbour less” screamed their banners there.
In the historic city of Cadiz, residents complain mass tourism has turned their home into “an amusement park.” In Majorca, the ire is directed against “drunkards and party-goers.” Thousands of families, seniors and students marched through the streets, saying “Majorca is not for sale.”
All this is happening against a backdrop of “record tourist numbers”, set to increase even further, aggravating all these issues even more.
I read all this, and thought how much it resonated with what Goa is experiencing right now. The difference is, there aren’t (yet) mass protests by residents. But Goa has the same problems, perhaps on a bigger scale, given our small size.
Even before the recent domestic tourist “invasion”, our cities (certainly Panjim), towns and villages barely had adequate water and electricity supply, civic infrastructure (sanitation, garbage and sewage management, public works and maintenance) for their resident populations. The idyllic paradisical Goa that visitors flock to experience is confined to little silos, gated pay-walled enclaves that residents have less and less agency over.
According to Zartico, “creators of the world’s only destination system, combining art and science to uncover intelligence and insights”, the visitor-to-resident ratio “is used as a measure of understanding the ‘stress’ a visitor economy is placing on the resident quality of life.” Locations with a VR ratio less than 1 “have additional capacity to welcome new visitors and the residents are not consistently impacted by visitors”. Ratios of 1.5 and above are problematic, adding “increasing levels of stress to residents.
Goa’s population was estimated at 1.5 million (2021 figures), and the tourist footfalls are over 7 million each year (2022 figures), giving a VR ratio closer to 5, perhaps higher.
“But it’s good for the economy,” I hear some of you say. The implication is that residents should endure everything that reduces their own quality of life and increases stress, from noise pollution, parking chaos, the complete absence of any traffic rules or discipline, litter and garbage to greet one every morning from raucous revellers returning from casino or bars, even physical violence from drunken party-goers, all because a cash-register is ringing somewhere.
I came across an interesting term, “tourism leakage” on a website, notintheguidebooks.com. “Tourism leakage is the idea that, of all the money you spend on a holiday, surprisingly little ends up in the pockets of the community you visit.” Instead, it “leaks” out to stakeholders not from the holiday location, and who are parasitically making pots of money while the residents put up with the problems generated from the mass tourism circus.
The website describes world locations where the “tourism leakage” is as much as 95%, with barely 5% actually going to the community being visited. What is Goa’s “tourism leakage” figure, I wonder. How much actually trickles back to the residents, barring a few invested in the hospitality industry, either as employers or employees? If our mass tourism is really as good as it is made out to be for our economy, should that not reflect in better governance, and better delivery of basic civic amenities to residents?
Goans being priced out of the housing market may not be solely due to mass tourism here, but it is a real problem we also share with the Spanish holiday destinations.
One added dimension that Goa unfortunately also has is casino tourism. The complicated relationship between gambling and tourism is addressed in another website, studytourism.in. I remembered the term “amusement park” in relation to Cadiz, and as a resident of the also historic Panjim quarter (now lumped together with “Fontane Haas, Fontainhas, for better or for worse), I completely empathise.
A beautiful riverfront promenade, once called Rua da Boa Vista (the street with a beautiful view), is now overrun with tacky, glitzy, flashing neon lights that also bring the word “circus” to mind. But casino tourism inevitably brings its darker side as well (gambling addiction, financial debt and bankruptcy, broken homes, organised crime, prostitution) and one would be naïve to assume it’s not there just because we can’t see it in the open.
“Panjim looks so alive, so vibrant at night now!” said a prominent heritage activist (not a Panjim resident, mind you but living in a quiet village safely removed) smugly within my earshot about a year or so ago. “It used to be so dull and boring before.”
Only those who live smack bang in the middle of a mass tourism hotspot know what stressors one has to endure on a daily (and nightly) basis, 24/7, the year round.
The banner slogan that resonated most as I watched that Deutsche Welle documentary on Spain’s mass tourism crisis was “This circus used to be my home!” This is exactly how I feel. When will we, like the harried residents in Barcelona, Málaga, Majorca also say “Enough!”, that the circus should stop?
This article first appeared in The Herald.