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By Marta Vidal, a teacher who has lived in Barcelona all her life.

Every morning, on my way to work, I used to pass a bakery that had sold bread to my grandmother. Last spring it closed, and a shop selling souvenir magnets opened in its place. Nobody in my neighbourhood buys magnets. That small change sums up what has happened to many of Europe's most beautiful cities: little by little, they are being reshaped for people who stay for three days and then leave.

Let me be clear: I am not against tourists. My own family travels, and I love showing visitors the city where I was born. The problem is not tourism itself but its scale. Barcelona is home to about 1.6 million people, yet it receives millions of visitors every year, most of them in the same few neighbourhoods during the same summer months. On some streets in the old city, it is now hard to find a resident at all.

The most serious damage is to housing. When an apartment can earn more from holiday rentals than from a family that pays rent every month, owners make the obvious choice. Rents rise, young people move to the suburbs, and neighbours are replaced by strangers with suitcases. In 2024, the city announced that it would stop renewing licences for tourist apartments by 2028. Many people outside Barcelona called this extreme. To those of us who cannot afford to live in the city where we grew up, it seemed overdue.

Barcelona is not alone. In 2024, Venice began charging some day visitors an entrance fee, and Amsterdam stopped approving new hotels. Critics call these measures unfriendly, even selfish. I see them as an attempt to keep cities alive as places where people live, not only places that people visit.

The usual reply is that tourism creates jobs. It does, and I do not dismiss that. But many of those jobs are seasonal and badly paid, and a large share of the profits goes to international companies rather than to local families. An economy that depends on a single industry is also fragile, as every tourist city discovered in 2020, when the visitors suddenly disappeared.

A city is not a theme park, and its residents are not part of the scenery. Setting limits is not a sign of hostility towards visitors; it is a way of making sure that there will still be a real city for them to visit. Protect the bakery, and the tourists will still come.

By Marta Vidal, a teacher who has lived in Barcelona all her life.

Every morning, on my way to work, I used to pass a bakery that had sold bread to my grandmother. Last spring it closed, and a shop selling souvenir magnets opened in its place. Nobody in my neighbourhood buys magnets. That small change sums up what has happened to many of Europe's most beautiful cities: little by little, they are being reshaped for people who stay for three days and then leave.

Let me be clear: I am not against tourists. My own family travels, and I love showing visitors the city where I was born. The problem is not tourism itself but its scale. Barcelona is home to about 1.6 million people, yet it receives millions of visitors every year, most of them in the same few neighbourhoods during the same summer months. On some streets in the old city, it is now hard to find a resident at all.

The most serious damage is to housing. When an apartment can earn more from holiday rentals than from a family that pays rent every month, owners make the obvious choice. Rents rise, young people move to the suburbs, and neighbours are replaced by strangers with suitcases. In 2024, the city announced that it would stop renewing licences for tourist apartments by 2028. Many people outside Barcelona called this extreme. To those of us who cannot afford to live in the city where we grew up, it seemed overdue.

Barcelona is not alone. In 2024, Venice began charging some day visitors an entrance fee, and Amsterdam stopped approving new hotels. Critics call these measures unfriendly, even selfish. I see them as an attempt to keep cities alive as places where people live, not only places that people visit.

The usual reply is that tourism creates jobs. It does, and I do not dismiss that. But many of those jobs are seasonal and badly paid, and a large share of the profits goes to international companies rather than to local families. An economy that depends on a single industry is also fragile, as every tourist city discovered in 2020, when the visitors suddenly disappeared.

A city is not a theme park, and its residents are not part of the scenery. Setting limits is not a sign of hostility towards visitors; it is a way of making sure that there will still be a real city for them to visit. Protect the bakery, and the tourists will still come.

By Marta Vidal, a teacher who has lived in Barcelona all her life.

Every morning, on my way to work, I used to pass a bakery that had sold bread to my grandmother. Last spring it closed, and a shop selling souvenir magnets opened in its place. Nobody in my neighbourhood buys magnets. That small change sums up what has happened to many of Europe's most beautiful cities: little by little, they are being reshaped for people who stay for three days and then leave.

Let me be clear: I am not against tourists. My own family travels, and I love showing visitors the city where I was born. The problem is not tourism itself but its scale. Barcelona is home to about 1.6 million people, yet it receives millions of visitors every year, most of them in the same few neighbourhoods during the same summer months. On some streets in the old city, it is now hard to find a resident at all.

The most serious damage is to housing. When an apartment can earn more from holiday rentals than from a family that pays rent every month, owners make the obvious choice. Rents rise, young people move to the suburbs, and neighbours are replaced by strangers with suitcases. In 2024, the city announced that it would stop renewing licences for tourist apartments by 2028. Many people outside Barcelona called this extreme. To those of us who cannot afford to live in the city where we grew up, it seemed overdue.

Barcelona is not alone. In 2024, Venice began charging some day visitors an entrance fee, and Amsterdam stopped approving new hotels. Critics call these measures unfriendly, even selfish. I see them as an attempt to keep cities alive as places where people live, not only places that people visit.

The usual reply is that tourism creates jobs. It does, and I do not dismiss that. But many of those jobs are seasonal and badly paid, and a large share of the profits goes to international companies rather than to local families. An economy that depends on a single industry is also fragile, as every tourist city discovered in 2020, when the visitors suddenly disappeared.

A city is not a theme park, and its residents are not part of the scenery. Setting limits is not a sign of hostility towards visitors; it is a way of making sure that there will still be a real city for them to visit. Protect the bakery, and the tourists will still come.