“This is not a city to live in. It’s a theme park where there’s no local life left. It’s all decoration.”
“Tourism is not going to be forever, and it’s destroying other ways of life.”
“We cannot live with those floods of people day after day.”
These are some quotes from Bye Bye Barcelona (59m, with English subtitles), a shocking documentary about tourism’s destructive effect on the culture of a city. Barcelona in Spain is the fourth most visited city in Europe after London, Paris and Rome, yet it is much smaller than those cities. The 1.5 million Barcelonians received more than 8 million tourists in 2013, most of them flown in by low-cost airlines. This compares to “only” 3.1 million tourists in 2000.
Bye Bye Barcelona, Eduardo Chibas, March 2014. Thanks to Adriana Parra.
