Almost a third of people in Spain believe there are too many tourists in their local area, a poll has shown.
Nearly half of Spaniards (49 percent) say there are “large” numbers of international travellers where they live, with 32 percent saying there are too many, according to a poll carried out by YouGov.
Residents in Catalonia, where the popular destinations of Spain’s Costa Brava and regional capital Barcelona are found, are the most likely to complain of too many tourists (48 percent), YouGov’s polling shows.
Issues of overtourism are likely to have resulted in a “sizeable” minority of Spaniards (28 percent) saying they have a negative view of tourists in their country.
This compares to second place France where 16 percent have an unfavourable view, 14 percent of Germans, 13 percent of Brits and 11 percent of Italians, according to YouGov.
YouGov’s Matthew Smith, Head of Data Journalism, said holiday rentals provoke particular ire in Spain, where the Spanish government recently announced a crackdown on such properties while Madrid said it will pause new licences for tourist flats.
Forty-five percent of Spaniards polled said they have a negative view of the holiday lettings industry, with 37 percent saying the sector brings more harm than benefits.
Twenty-one percent of Brits polled say the same of the holiday lets industry in the UK, while 43 percent say there are more benefits than harms.
This compares to 33 percent in Spain who told the pollster the holiday lets industry does more good than harm.
Spanish tourism hotspots including the Canary Islands and Balearic Islands have seen mass protests this summer as locals complain of being priced out of their local housing market as properties are snapped up and converted into holiday lets.
Protesters in Barcelona hit the headlines when it was reported some squirted tourists with water pistols, but despite such tactics, a majority of those polled in each country expressed either “a great deal” or “fair amount” of sympathy with overtourism demonstrators.
Anti-tourism activist Marta Pérez, 37, from Cadiz, Spain, told The Olive Press mass tourism has pushed rents to unaffordable levels.
She said landlords are constantly kicking families out of their homes to make way for tourist apartments. Ms Pérez said the main problem with such flats is the tourists who stay in them annoy you when you’re in your own home, coming and going at night, ringing door buzzers in the early hours and leaving their rubbish in doorways.
The schoolteacher said banning holiday lets outright was totalitarian, but suggested regulating them and increasing tourist taxes. She recommended staying in a hotel and not a tourist flat, taking out your rubbish and leaving it in the right bins.
Ms Pérez added: “Try as best as you can not to annoy the people who live in the area. We all have to travel more conscientiously on an individual level.”
YouGov polled 2,189 Brits; 1,013 adults in France; 2,301 Germans; 1,026 Danes; 1,021 people in Sweden; 1,060 residents in Spain and 1,011 Italians between August 6 and August 20, 2024.
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