Despite a spring and summer of protests from the Canaries to the Balearics, and from Barcelona to Cádiz, not every part of Spain is overrun with swarms of tourists or, come to that, with beach-occupying, waterpistol-waving activists demanding an end to unchecked mass tourism.
As the high season winds down on the Cíes islands, off the north-western region of Galicia, a young cormorant keeps a beady eye on visitors as they traipse across a breakwater. A kestrel hovers, almost static, above the lighthouse, its gaze on an early, possibly lizard-based lunch.
A little way off the quartz-white beach, a pair of fishers in oilskins haul clams from the Atlantic depths as another boat putters over the smooth waters.
Such tranquil scenes are a relatively recent phenomenon. Before the regional government introduced a daily cap on visitor numbers seven years ago, thousands of people would pitch up every day of the summer, putting the archipelago, which forms part of Galicia’s Atlantic Islands national park, under huge strain.
Today, 1,800 visitors can visit the islands each day from 15 May to 15 September, after which the cap falls to 450 a day. Before setting off, each visitor needs to obtain a QR code from the website of the regional government and then pay €25 (£21) for the ferry ride there and back.
“There were just too many people before,” says José Antonio Fernández Bouzas, the park’s director. “But now people understand the need for the cap and they respect and appreciate it. We need the access controls to protect the area, but they also mean that people can enjoy their visits.”
Although some people enjoy a good moan on TripAdvisor – the water’s too cold; a thieving seagull ate my chocolate pastry; it gets very crowded up by the picturesque lighthouse – Fernández Bouzas is adamant that the decision to cap visitors was the right one.
“That reduction has worked. There’s an effect you get because people like something that feels more exclusive,” he says. “People used to reserve their places on the day, but now they reserve them three months in advance. They really plan their visits. People are also coming all year round, when it used to be just July and August.”
Ecotourism, he adds, is the best way to manage the difficult balance between protecting the natural beauty of the islands and bringing socioeconomic development to the surrounding area: “It’s about conserving them so that people can enjoy them – and tourism should be very focused on the defence and protection of the natural world that forms the base of its business.”
Although it may be tempting to see the visitor cap as a possible answer to the overtourism crisis, experts are quick to dispel the idea. They argue that while limiting visitor numbers may work in the Cíes, it will do nothing to address the issues that have been fuelling protests around Spain and beyond.
“If we try to put caps on the number of people entering a city – as they’ve tried in Venice – then you end up turning the city into a theme park,” says Claudio Milano, a researcher at the University of Barcelona’s social anthropology department.
“What you’ve got in the Islas Cíes and in Machu Picchu and in these big national parks is something that works in parks, where we need careful capacity because of the environment. If you do that in a city, then the message you’re sending out is that this is a theme park.”
Milano says this year’s “domino effect” demonstrations in mainland Spain, the Balearics and the Canaries show the extent to which tourism has become a focus for socioeconomic and political grievances and anxieties.
“We need to remember that these movements are anti-touristification and not anti-tourism – that’s the key and the big difference,” he says. “More than this being a turning point, it feels like a moment when tourism has become politicised in different contexts.”
Milano says concerns about overtourism are merely the tip of the iceberg; below the surface are the hulking issues of housing problems, precarious employment and the climate emergency.
“If we didn’t have housing problems in cities such as Seville, Málaga, Cádiz and Barcelona, then Airbnb would be a minor problem,” he says. “We also need employment reforms. If jobs in tourism weren’t so precarious and seasonal, then we wouldn’t have these problems. What we need to do now is solve these problems that are related to tourism. But it isn’t just about reducing the number of flights; it’s also about not keeping on increasing them.”
Linda Osti, a senior tourism lecturer at Bangor University, says tourism can often be a scapegoat for wider social ills.
“There are conflicts happening between the tourists and the local people and sometimes local communities feel it’s the tourism and the tourists,” she says. “But more than that, it’s the economic sector and how things are evolving that haven’t been planned well enough.”
Osti says the intense media coverage that the protests in places such as Barcelona have attracted in recent months has led to demonstrations elsewhere that lay bare a profound disconnection between local and regional governments and those they serve.
“What’s missing is communication between the local authorities and the members of the local community so that they can understand what they want – what their problems are,” she said. “The local authorities need to let them know that they are working – and how they’re working.”
With different destinations at different stages of tourist development – cities have other sources of income, while the economies of some Mediterranean islands are overwhelmingly dependent on revenue from holidaymakers – there is no easy fix, says Osti.
“A lot depends on what percentage of the population is involved in the tourism sector,” she adds. “From there we need either to diversify or to include people in tourism in a more equal and fairer way. But communication is the first thing; all of these protests are showing that there’s no trust in the local authorities and local governments. Trust needs to be reinstated and communication needs to be reinstated.”
Sitting on a boat off the Cíes archipelago, Fernández Bouzas is equally blunt when asked about the dangers of putting profit before protection in the blind pursuit of tourism. “It’s about conserving these islands so that people can enjoy them,” he says. “If you don’t conserve them, there’s no point. You’d end up killing the goose that lays the golden eggs after a couple of days.”
