You’ve seen the graffiti. You may have seen the protests. So, does Barcelona really not want tourists?
Walk around Barcelona for long enough and you may eventually find three words written on a wall:
TOURISTS GO HOME.
Not exactly the welcome message you were expecting.
In recent years, Barcelona has become one of the symbols of Europe’s debate about overtourism. There have been demonstrations, arguments over holiday apartments, complaints about cruise ships and crowded neighbourhoods, and a growing discussion about something much bigger than tourism itself:
Who is a city for?
So should you feel guilty about visiting Barcelona?
No.
Tourism is part of Barcelona. It creates businesses, supports jobs and brings people from all over the world into a city that has been trading, travelling and exchanging cultures for centuries.
In 2025 alone, Barcelona received around 16 million visitors, who spent more than €10 billion in the city, according to the Barcelona Tourism Observatory.
The issue isn’t simply that people come.
It’s what happens when huge numbers of visitors want to experience the same city at the same time.
And Barcelona has been wrestling with that question for years.
Start with housing
Barcelona’s housing crisis wasn’t created by tourists.
Property investment, construction, wages, population changes and the wider housing market all matter — and so does how little, for many years, the rules protected the people renting.
But tourism adds another pressure.
A flat can be somewhere for a person to live.
It can also be somewhere for hundreds of visitors to stay over the course of a year.
And in neighbourhoods where demand from visitors is particularly high, those two uses can collide.
Researchers studying Airbnb in Barcelona found evidence that short-term rentals increased both rents and property prices, with substantially larger effects in areas where Airbnb activity was most concentrated.
That doesn’t mean Airbnb caused Barcelona’s housing crisis.
It does help explain why a holiday apartment can be a much more politically charged subject here than a visitor might expect.
And why you may encounter posters saying:
“Stay in a hotel or hostel.”
“A family used to live here.”
“Housing is not a business.”
You don’t have to agree with every slogan.
But it’s worth understanding where the anger comes from.
Barcelona didn’t suddenly start arguing about tourism
There’s a useful bit of recent history here.
In 2015, Barcelona elected Ada Colau as mayor.
What made that remarkable was where she came from.
Colau had been one of the founders and most recognisable figures of Spain’s anti-eviction movement, the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH). She went from campaigning alongside families facing eviction to running one of Europe’s most visited cities.
She remained mayor for eight years.
And tourism became one of the big urban questions of that period.
Soon after taking office, her government imposed a moratorium on new tourist-accommodation licences. Barcelona later introduced the PEUAT, an urban plan that regulates where hotels, hostels, tourist apartments and other accommodation can expand according to the pressure already present in different parts of the city. The system, in updated form, remains in operation today.
Her government also pursued illegal tourist apartments and pressured platforms to remove unlicensed listings. These measures were controversial: tourism and property interests challenged restrictions, while some neighbourhood movements argued they still didn’t go far enough.
That’s worth knowing because today’s debate didn’t begin with a few viral videos of protesters.
Barcelona has been asking for years how much tourism a neighbourhood can absorb before the neighbourhood itself starts to change.
A market is still a market
Now for something much simpler.
La Boqueria is wonderful. Go.
Look around. Smell everything. Take photographs. Try things.
And buy something.
Because there’s a strange thing that can happen when a traditional market becomes internationally famous.
People stop using it as a market.
Imagine trying to buy fish for dinner while a group of twenty people stands in the aisle photographing it.
Or thousands of people passing your stall every day without actually being customers.
Eventually, the economics start changing too. Products designed for residents can give way to products designed for people passing through.
None of this means tourists shouldn’t visit markets.
Quite the opposite.
Visit the market. Use the market.
Buy some fruit. Have breakfast. Get cheese for a picnic. Ask what something is.
And let the person behind you get past.
They’re trying to buy dinner.
Your tourist tax isn’t just another line on the bill
When you stay in Barcelona, you’ll normally pay a tourist tax.
It’s easy to see it as just another charge.
But there’s an interesting principle behind it:
if tourism creates pressure on a city, should some of the money generated by tourism help pay for that city?
Barcelona already does this to some extent.
Tourist-tax revenues have funded projects involving the management of heavily visited areas, local commerce, major events, culture, science and professional training. One 2025 allocation, for example, distributed €11.64 million among 27 projects.
Where tourism revenue should go — promotion, housing, public services, culture, neighbourhoods or something else — is itself part of the political debate.
But the underlying idea is interesting:
tourism shouldn’t only extract value from a place. Some value should return to it.
We rather like that idea.
And then there are the cruise ships
Cruises might be the perfect example of Barcelona’s tourism dilemma.
They create economic activity and jobs.
They also bring enormous numbers of people into a relatively small city, often for just a few hours, while the ships themselves have an environmental footprint.
In 2024, around 3.65 million cruise passengers passed through the Port of Barcelona.
The city and the Port are changing the model. Cruise activity is being concentrated farther from the urban centre, the number of terminals is planned to fall from seven to five by 2030, and cruise berths are due to be electrified so compatible ships can connect to shore power while docked.
But here’s something important:
none of that makes the person stepping off a cruise ship a bad tourist.
You didn’t design Barcelona’s port.
And even if you have only five hours here, you still get to decide what you do with them.
Barcelona doesn’t have to be:
coach → Sagrada Família → Rambla → souvenir → ship.
Have a coffee.
Walk down a side street.
Buy something from a bakery.
Find out what neighbourhood you’re standing in.
Five hours isn’t long.
It’s still enough to be curious.
So, what can you actually do?
This is where conversations about responsible tourism can become exhausting.
Nobody wants to spend their holiday wondering whether ordering a second beer is contributing to the collapse of Western civilisation.
You’re here to enjoy yourself.
So we’d keep it simple.
Sleep responsibly
Check that your accommodation is legal.
And if you’re staying in a residential building, remember that the person sharing the lift with you may not be on holiday.
They have work tomorrow.
Use the market. Don’t just photograph it.
Go to La Boqueria.
And Santa Caterina. Sant Antoni. Or the neighbourhood market you happen to walk past.
But participate.
A market stays alive when it remains a place of exchange, not just a backdrop for photographs.
Let some of your money stay local
You don’t need to boycott every international brand.
Just leave some room for the bakery, café, restaurant, bookshop, market stall, guide or independent business that belongs to the place you’ve travelled all this way to experience.
Don’t just think about how much you spend.
Occasionally think about where it lands.
Move around like the city moves
Walk when that works for you.
Take the Metro, bus, tram or train. Take a taxi when you need one. Cycle if that’s your thing.
There is no prize for exhausting yourself in the name of responsible tourism.
And accessibility matters too: the best way to move around a city is the one that actually works for you.
Remember that Barcelona has a bedtime
Your Tuesday night might be someone’s Wednesday morning.
Have fun.
Stay out late.
Just remember that the apartment three metres above the bar probably contains someone trying to sleep.
Learn two words
Bon dia.
Gràcies.
They won’t solve Barcelona’s housing crisis.
But they acknowledge something important: you’ve arrived somewhere with its own language, history and culture.
If you’re wondering why Barcelona speaks Catalan, that’s another story — and one worth knowing.
Don’t try to be the perfect tourist
This might be the most important part.
Travel is supposed to be enjoyable.
Eat too much.
Get lost.
Take far too many photographs.
Spend three hours on the beach doing absolutely nothing.
Responsible travel shouldn’t be a guilt exercise.
It just means remembering that your holiday destination is somebody else’s home.
Take it with you
And none of this really belongs to Barcelona.
Take it to Lisbon. Venice. Amsterdam. Málaga. Paris. Kyoto. Or wherever you travel next.
And when you get home, remember that visitors come to your city too.
The details change.
The principle doesn’t.
So, are tourists welcome in Barcelona?
We think there’s room for a more interesting answer than yes or no.
Barcelona is not a theme park.
It’s a real city: beautiful, crowded, contradictory, imperfect and alive.
Tourism is part of it.
And so are we.
We make our living helping people experience Barcelona. Pretending we’re somehow outside this conversation would be ridiculous.
We don’t think the answer is to stop travelling.
We think it’s to travel with a little more curiosity about where you are, a little more respect for the people who live there, and a little more thought about what you leave behind.
Enjoy Gaudí.
Enjoy the food.
Enjoy the beach, the football, the museums, the boats, the markets and the nights that last considerably longer than you intended.
Just remember that Barcelona will still be here on Monday morning.
Enjoy Barcelona — and give back.