Spains tourism is at tipping point

**Ed Butler** (0:01)
Europe's holiday season isn't what it used to be.

**Cathy Bullen** (0:04)
Huge flames come over the hill from the northwest. There were planes and helicopters and water bombs going on.

**Ed Butler** (0:12)
Fires are terrifying the tourists, and the locals are up in arms too.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:19)
Everything's at breaking point. Transport links to and from the island and the traffic are a nightmare.

**Ed Butler** (0:25)
This is World Business Report from the BBC World Service. I'm Ed Butler and today we are in France and in Spain hearing of forest fires and the rising anger that's growing against what's called over-tourism, blighting some of the region's most popular destinations. Also why Germany may have a sick leave problem and why a wanted drugs fugitive has reportedly taken residence in West Africa. But first, in what's become something of an annual ritual in Europe, anti-tourism protesters have been on the streets of several Spanish cities this weekend, Barcelona and Granada among them. It was in Mallorca, though, where the biggest protests took place, including some violent clashes with police.
Rubber bullets fired there as tens of thousands of people marched in the city of Palma de Mallorca. According to island residents, Spain's tourism industry is putting an increasing strain on the population and the environment.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:40)
Today, we are once again gathering and we are doing so under the slogan Mallorca at its limit, because all limits are being exceeded when it comes to the tourism system and the monoculture that is taking hold on our islands.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:01)
We can see the populations rising, the number of visitors is rising, but resources aren't keeping pace, nor is the infrastructure. And of course, there comes a point when we get rather fed up. We see a rather bleak future ahead, more for our children than for ourselves.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:20)
Everything is at breaking point. Transport links to and from the island and the traffic are a nightmare.
There are always traffic jams. The trains can't cope. It's an island. There is a limit to the land, the resources and everything.

**Ed Butler** (2:37)
Spain is the world's second most visited country after France. It welcomed 96.8 million tourists in 2025, a record high and an increase on the previous year. The government says that tourists contribute more than 70 billion dollars a year to the economy.
Tourism's role is a key driver of the country's growth. But like in other hotspots, Venice, Amsterdam, Japanese cities like Kyoto and the island of Bali, for instance, many people are complaining that the economic benefits of tourism are not being felt by the locals who are being priced out of the economy. Ko Koens is a professor of new urban tourism at the University of Inholland in the Netherlands.

**Ko Koens** (3:20)
Every year we have seen some of these protests in certain cities. So it's not that it's a one-off, that it's just happened once and that's it. It really is now in a way a sort of a trend in the southern European cities, where there are more local skills and protests.

**Ed Butler** (3:38)
There were some interesting slogans being used by the protesters. They were talking about, My home is not your hotel. They're also talking about no more coffee franchises, fast food or cheesecake shops. Is that quite common that people are actually very specific about the nature of the way the economy is being distorted?

**Ko Koens** (3:58)
I would say yes, these protests and discussions are nearly always linked to general processes of gentrification or house prices going up, in possibility to rent houses anymore, because they're either going to short-term rental services or long-term rental services for, let's say, expats. So these protests really need to be seen in the light of wider development. It's not purely the tourism that is being protested against. It's poor quality of living circumstances, greater uncertainty, commercialization of the high streets, shall we say, or the fact that truly local shops and facilities are being replaced by more generalistic ones.

**Ed Butler** (4:44)
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, isn't it? Because if you are in a tourist hotspot, I guess what tourists want quite often is, I don't know, they want pancakes with chocolate spread on top. They don't necessarily want a bakery of the standard old-fashioned kind.

**Ko Koens** (4:59)
Yeah, to an extent, of course, because this is, I think, is the interesting paradox. Yes, there are quite a lot of visitors who would like just a normalized tourism structure like your pancakes or your ice cream shops or whatever local delicacy people think belongs to the place. But at the same time, we also see that there's a large group of visitors that really look out for what they then see as the authentic city and they are actually also annoyed by the fact that every place looks the same nowadays.