Barcelona, Venice and Amsterdam are among Europe’s favourite travel destinations and benefit greatly from tourism. However, the massive influx of visitors places a considerable burden on the cities and their inhabitants.
To counteract the negative effects of overtourism, these cities are taking decisive action. Following public protests, no new hotels may be built in Venice and cruise ships will have to use other moorings in future. Amsterdam has banned guided tours of its famous red light district in order to protect local residents. Paris is planning to ban coaches from the city centre in order to improve the quality of life. Other overcrowded cities are also trying to control the situation through various methods.
Do you think that overtourism is a serious problem in Europe?
Sources: National Statistics Offices, Statista, Le Monde, Forbes
London in particular has a very transient local population - a lot of people move there for a few years then move on. Wikipedia has the city at ~50% ‘overseas born’ at the moment - it’s a very cosmopolitan place. So having about double the number of tourists as ‘residents’ isn’t going to have the same cultural impact that it would in some of the other cities here
I’m surprised that there’s as many as 250k ‘locals’ in Venice, it was my understanding that they mostly live inland or up the coast and commute into the city.
There are parts of London which are hell to visit because they are overly popular with tourists. An example being borough market at lunch time, it’s all tourists and you can’t move. I don’t begrudge anyone and I can happily just avoid it but it really makes me realise how hard it must be in the much smaller cities with higher ratios.
My wife went to Venice recently with her mum and said that the service staff were predominantly South Asian, so I wonder how much of that 250k is immigrant population there to service the huge tourism industry.
