When her husband, who had cancer at the time, took a tumble in the couple’s sixth-floor flat last year, Maria frantically wondered who she could call for help to lift him.
In another building, another era, she might have dashed next door to ask a neighbour. But it wasn’t an option in her 11-unit building in central Lisbon, where tourist flats had proliferated and turned long-term residents into a rarity.
She resorted to calling the fire service. But the moment stuck with her, hinting at the community she had lost as a ceaseless rotation of tourists moved in and out of all but three of the building’s units.
“I really miss it. We should be a kind of social network,” said Maria, who asked that her full name not be published. “And that social network doesn’t exist.”
The 71-year-old is among those who have been left to grapple with southern Europe’s overtourism problem in the most intimate of ways: trading neighbours for a steady stream of suitcase-totting tourists in their buildings’ elevators, hallways and lobbies.
As tourist arrivals swell to record numbers in Spain and Portugal, some residents have found themselves living in buildings where tourist flats make up the majority of units. In the most extreme cases, residents have been left on their own, surrounded entirely by tourist flats.
“It’s very weird. Imagine, I have no neighbours, even though I’m in the middle of a big city,” said Alex, who lives in a building in Lisbon where every single other unit is rented via platforms such as Airbnb. “It’s like I live in a ghost place. There’s plenty of people, I just don’t know anybody.”
As the only owner who lives in the building, it has fallen to Alex to report rubbish left at the entrance or names scratched into the elevator door. “I’m a pain and I hate that too,” said Alex, who asked that their full name not be published. “I didn’t sign up for this.”
While Alex described the abundance of tourist flats as understandable given the city’s reliance on tourism, it was dismaying to see the personal costs that some were forced to bear.
“If I need sugar or if I have an emergency, there’s no door I can knock on,” said Alex. “We are planning on moving because I can no longer handle not having a community.”
In Barcelona one retiree, who for more than a decade has lived below two tourist flats, said she had become known to local police after years of calling them to break up parties that regularly stretch past 3am.
“It’s horrible, absolutely horrible,” said Esther, who asked that her full name not be published. “It’s inhumane – nobody should live like this.”
The 69-year-old said she had seen all sorts of people pass through the building. “People leave broken bottles around the building, or urine and faeces in the stairwell. Some throw rubbish off the balcony,” she said.
“One time someone brought [sex workers] here and proceeded to have sex on the balcony, in view of all the neighbours.”
She now lived constantly on edge, battling anxiety after years of bracing herself for who might turn up next. “You just never know what to expect,” she said.
About 700 miles away in Lisbon, the sentiment was echoed by Joao Povoa. “I live sandwiched in between two tourist flats: one below and one above,” the 43-year-old said.
Neighbours in his five-unit building, a stone’s throw from the city’s Praça do Comércio, began leaving about 10 years ago. “It’s just totally different now. To be honest, you don’t know anybody … it’s like being in a hotel.”
Unlike a hotel, however, tourists in these flats were traipsing through an 18th-century building with wood floors, where little consideration had been given to noise insulation. “It makes you a bit anxious sometimes,” he said. “It’s a bit of a lottery because you never know if they are going to behave or not.”
He brushed off any possibility of moving. While Lisbon’s soaring cost of housing meant there was little chance of finding a similar, centrally located, property, he also felt called to resist leaving an area where just one traditional cafe remained amid a sea of trendy brunch spots aimed at tourists. “We have to try. Because if you give up, then there’s going to be nobody living here – the community is shrinking.”
The six locals who spoke to the Guardian from Lisbon and Barcelona highlighted fairly similar concerns about being surrounded by tourist flats: lifts that are often broken from regularly hauling suitcases and cleaning carts, never-ending noise concerns as tourists party, slam doors and hold late-night gab sessions and the disorienting experience of living with a relentless stream of strangers parading through the building’s common areas.
In early December, Lurdes Pinheiro, who lives Lisbon, decided she had had enough. For a decade, neighbours had trickled out of her five-floor building in the city’s Alfama neighbourhood, only to be swiftly replaced by tourists. “We decided to move out to places that still had some community.”
One of the hardest parts of moving was saying goodbye to the handful of residents still left in the building. “One of them started crying, saying: ‘We’re losing all our neighbours’,” she said. “It was painful, we had been living in the same place for more than 30 years.”
It is exactly that kind of community that Maite Martin and her neighbours have been scrambling to preserve in Barcelona’s Eixample neighbourhood.
When she and her family moved into their flat in 2000, Martin had been certain that she was going to live there for the rest of her life. She poured her own funds into renovating the rental to make it more comfortable, upgrading the windows and overhauling the washrooms.
Then came news that the building’s owner had been granted permission to convert all the 120 units into tourist flats. With the help of a local housing syndicate, the tenants began fighting back, leading to a halt in the conversion of flats until a court settled the matter.
Until then, the building is home to 33 flats that are rented to tourists and other short-term visitors, giving rise to an unusual clash of cultures.
“Last year, February, I’ll never forget it. We had one Italian tourist in the flat upstairs decide to vomit – I repeat, vomit – in the interior courtyard where everyone hangs their clothes to dry,” Martin said. “Just as well that I had the plastic rain curtain there. Because he would have vomited all over the laundry.”
At times, the smell of marijuana has wafted through the corridors, while it has become common to find cigarette butts tossed on to their balconies. One time she went to the tourist flat above her own to ask about an incessant noise – “My son said to me, it’s like somebody is tap dancing” – only to be confronted by an angry drummer who insisted he needed to practice, while another time the building’s porter was called in to break up a party of 24 people in a flat meant for six.
Martin and her neighbours are not the only ones pushing back against the proliferation of tourist flats. In Lisbon, more than 6,600 residents recently signed a call for a binding referendum on whether the city should ban tourist flats in residential blocks.
In Barcelona, the residents in Esther’s building have turned to the courts in hopes of removing the licences for the building’s two tourist flats. Last summer tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets across Spain, calling for curbs on mass tourism and a rethink of a business model that they blamed for pushing up housing prices and driving local residents out of cities.
While Martin welcomed the battle, she had also resigned herself to the idea that she would probably be pushed out to make way for more-profitable tourist flats.
“I’m fighting here, we’re all fighting here, because I think we’ve got to do it,” she said. “But it makes me cry sometimes because the landlord, as the owner, has the last say. So if he doesn’t want to renew the lease, he’s got all the right to do so.”
In the meantime, however, the cumulation of factors – the steady erosion of the building’s once-vibrant community and the constant travails of living alongside tourists with little respect for the place she calls home – had taken a toll.
“I’m a sociable person, I really am. But it gets to the point that when I see somebody with a suitcase, I just turn away,” she said. “And I know it’s not their fault. I’m a tourist too, because my husband and I, we’ve travelled often. And now I’m at the other end.”
