After decades of relentlessly marketing their vibrant Mediterranean city, the Barcelona authorities have appointed a man on a mission to say “no more” – and, he says, to return its most iconic market back to local residents.
Last year, the Barcelona area attracted 26 million visitors, up 2.4% on 2024. The appointment of José Antonio Donaire as the city’s first commissioner for sustainable tourism represents a significant change of heart and a shift away from viewing tourism as an unalloyed good to believing it is alienating citizens and eroding the Catalan capital’s identity.
“We’ve reached the end of the road, Barcelona has reached the maximum number of tourists it can accommodate,” he says. “We don’t want more tourists, not even one more, but we need to manage those we have.”
It could take some time to feel the impact of the changes Donaire proposes, not least because, whatever the city’s intentions, other actors, many of them beyond its control – such as the port, the airport, airlines, hoteliers and the big-is-better travel industry – may not be on the same page.
But there is no doubting his sincerity and ambition, which even extends to rescuing Barcelona’s famous La Boquería market, emblematic of the worst of what mass tourism has wrought on the city’s identity.
La Boquería, once a haven for chefs and foodies but for years a no-go area for most of Barcelona’s residents, will, he says, return to being a market that sells fresh food rather than takeaway snacks, which will be banned with the consent of the majority of stall holders.
“Within a year you’ll see the new Boquería,” Donaire says.
The city’s attempt to curb visitor numbers began in 2017 with a moratorium on building new hotels in central Barcelona, but that was largely undermined by the rapid surge in short-let tourist apartments listed on sites such as Airbnb.
In 2028, Barcelona’s 10,000 legal tourist apartments will have their licences revoked and it is hoped by the city council that the majority of these properties find their way back on to the rental market and alleviate the city’s housing crisis.
Donaire accepts this has not been the case in New York City – which in effect banned tourist apartments in 2022 without any subsequent increase in rentals – but says Barcelona has plans to incentivise landlords to put property back on the market.
“At the moment the housing stock is growing by 2,000 homes a year,” he says. “If we can get those 10,000 tourist apartments on the residential market, it’s the equivalent of five years’ growth.”
Donaire, an eloquent man with a penchant for tartan waistcoats who came to the job with a professorship at the University of Girona and as director of its tourism research institute, says the new policies are not aimed so much at reducing numbers as changing the profile and behaviour of visitors.
About 65% of visitors are classified as “leisure tourists” while the rest are either in Barcelona for conferences, or are what Donaire describes as “cultural visitors” who come for the museums, architecture and music festivals.
He says the aim is to reduce the number of leisure tourists to arrive at an equal three-way split between them, culture visitors and people coming on business. Other measures include reducing the number of cruise ship berths from seven to five: the city though will still receive upwards of three million cruise passengers each year.
These visitors spend little when they’re ashore and, as Donaire puts it, “create more problems than benefits”.
Another group that will not be affected by restrictions on city centre hotels and tourist lets are the seven million annual day trippers, most of whom arrive by coach. Barcelona has increased parking fees and forced coaches to park on the periphery of the city in an effort to reduce numbers.
About half of tourists in Barcelona are repeat visitors who will have already seen the main sites and Donaire plans to encourage this group to make day trips out of the city or to visit areas such as Montjuïc, a large park that is home to several museums but scarcely any residents.
“What we don’t want is to encourage tourism in areas that aren’t prepared for it and where it will create problems,” he says.
Barcelona is also – and not for the first time – clamping down on various forms of antisocial behaviour, including a ban on organised pub crawls. “We’re not interested in this type of tourism and we want it to disappear,” says Donaire. It furthermore plans to invest a portion of the recently increased tourist tax into the city centre to increase local commerce in an area where retail is dominated by convenience stores, souvenir and cannabis shops.
Such proposals will no doubt be received with some scepticism, especially as quality over quantity – although those were not Donaire’s words – is not a new refrain, but he and his backers hope that after 30 years of tourist boom the balance may be tipped back in favour of Barcelona’s residents. “Many citizens feel the city centre no longer belongs to them,” Donaire says. Can he be the man to give it back to them?