In Spain, the popular revolt in the cities against the damages of mass tourism is spreading. After Barcelona, the Balearics and the Canaries, the protests have also spread to Malaga.
Syoung people last were thousands of people in piazza in the cities in southern Spain, against the increase in rents and house prices caused by the devastating increase in tourist activity in recent years. The country estimates that there were 15 thousand participants.
Malaga, twenty years ago the city welcomed about half a million tourists, in recent years it has become a center of mass tourism, reaching the figure of 1.6 million in 2023, with forecasts for this year of even higher numbers.
But the success of mass tourism has simultaneously caused increasing discomfort to residents due to the strong increase in tourist accommodation, consequently making it difficult and very expensive for the living conditions of the inhabitants to find apartments to live in.
The one in Malaga it’s not the first demonstration in the masses against the devastations dhe turismo in the masses in Spain.
They had in fact started residents ofthe Balearics and Of Barcelona then those of the Canariese the demonstrations They were all well attended. However, the one in Malaga is the first to be held in a city that until a few decades ago was not one of the great tourist destinations in Spain, and which has therefore undergone a perhaps more radical change.
To Malaga in 2016 the apartments registered for tourist use in Malaga were 846, today they are become 12 thousand, and this without considering the apartments rented to tourists but not registered. According to an investigation conducted byl Countryin various neighborhoods of central Malaga between 20 and 25 percent of all accommodation is registered on Airbnb and house prices have skyrocketed.
According to a survey duct According to the University of Malaga, today 72 percent of the city’s inhabitants believe that tourism has a negative or very negative effect on the availability of housing for the population.
In Barcelona, right now, The mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, one of the cities most affected bythe same phenomenon and among the first to see demonstrations against mass tourismhas proposed a drastic solution: the more than 10,000 licenses for short-term rentals, expiring in 2028, will not be renewed.
Barcelona is a city of 1.6 million inhabitants and last year it welcomed more than 12 million tourists. It is one of the cases of so-called overtourismthat is, of excess tourism.
What is happening in Spain is of extraordinary importance also for our country, where the damages of mass tourism are becoming evident not only in cities like Rome and Venice but also in Naples, Milan, Florence where the denunciation of the consequences of this has until now been limited to small groups of social activists.
In our newspaper, in times decidedly unsuspected, we denounced how, in the case of Rome, tourism had become a resource for a few and a damage for many. The level of private appropriation of tourism revenues to the detriment of the rest of the cities has become decidedly unbearable.
July 2, 2024 – © Reproduction possible WITH THE EXPLICIT CONSENT of the EDITORIAL BOARD of CONTROPIANO
Last edit: July 2, 2024, 10:07 am
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