97 million people visited Spain last year — more than double its population. They spent an average of 1375€, slightly more than the minimum wage in Spain for a month of full time work. Furthermore, almost 70% of these intend to visit again this year. This tourist mass is not equally distributed among its regions: Barcelona saw 900 tourists for every 100 residents, the Balearic Islands held 1200 tourists for every 100 residents, the Canary Islands recieved 7 times its population in tourists. To this, there is a popular reprise: "guiris go home". Barcelona's streets were not built for 10 million tourists; from the Roman grid of its historical origin to the incredibly influential ensanche (widening) of Ildefonso Cerdá, to its current periphery, they were drawn with Barcelona's residents in mind, and perhaps a healthy amount of tourism. However, the symptoms suffered by my coastal siblings are not really about the groups of clueless tourists clogging up sidewalks, plazas and beaches, as annoying as it is. Any urban center with its own metropolitan area will suffer from congestion and crowding, perfect planning notwithstanding. No, the actual ill moving more residents to the streets every year is that this mass of visitors is displacing the residents of these tourist attractors away from their neighborhoods, pushed towards a periphery that's not necessarily more affordable, just not priced for the central-northern European "expat" living with the salary and retirement of a richer country.
As disrupting as this trend is, gentrification in the form of touristification, it is hardly the fault of any of these 94 million tourists visiting in the year 2025. The tourist model of Spain in its current form finds its roots in a fascist, un-isolating Spain that has just received the "General Stabilization Plan" from John Hollister and the IMF, and is looking to wipe the memory of the Civil War and summary executions from the minds of the Europeans now, at least, nominally repulsed by the remains of the fascism that embroiled the world in a war barely a decade prior. The mayor of a small coastal village, Benidorm, sees in the prospective opening up of Spain a chance to enrich his municipality and, with the guidance and support of the dictatorship, the sol y playa (sun and beach) model of tourism is implanted, looking to appeal to as many tourists as possible with as cheap a hotel room and drinks as is possible. In a few decades time, and at a rate of generally constant growth, the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian peninsula and the Balearic and Canary archipelagos become covered in a blanket of development, whether through the monomunetal skyscrapers that now outline Benidorm's skyline or the scattered homes dotted through the mountains to its east. Today, there is, generally speaking, a continuous cord of urbanized constructions from Girona to Cádiz.
As hinted earlier, it wasn't the "middle class" tourists of Liverpool and Bremen who built these new cities and homes on the coasts. Strictly speaking, it was the workers of the construction sector, which has employed both Spaniards and migrants from Latin America and the northern half of Africa at varying proportions through the years. In a more essential sense, though, it has been the Spanish haute and middle capital and land owner class that has, through its continuous ownership of the land from the decades of the Falange, that has transformed the coastal cities and countryside. Earlier, we spoke of the streets of Barcelona. The streets of a city are usually permanent and stable; the map of Roman Barcelona can be neatly superposed on the same series or streets today, more than 2000 years later. Nothing remains, however, of the military constructions of the Roman garrison. What is contained by a city's streets is subject to a continuous renewal; owners pass on ownership, buildings are remodeled to fit new uses, new needs, and new rules. On a larger timescale, every block sheds its skin; from wood to stone, from stone to adobe, from adobe to brick and mortar, and concrete. The owners of the land and the buildings that sit atop it continuously look to make the use of their property that will ensure their own sustenance and, they all hope, growth. The open blocks of the ensanche plan of Barcelona that previously breathed through green spaces inside each one and were meant to house the 1.5 million emigrees from rural Spain have now been filled in completely or almost so with more housing to squeeze rents out of and, semi-simultaneously, changed the intended tenants from permanent residents to tourists who will remain for a month at most.
The interior of the cities more applicable to the sun and beach model (and other, smaller, models) has been internally shifted by everyone from the tiny owners of a second or third homes to the investments funds that own entire apartment blocks. The tourists only go to the extent that they are accommodated and catered to; the mutation of entire neighborhoods into glorified theme parks happened before and in parallel with the arrival of millions, not after they arrived. The tourist, in this view, is not an active agent. They are the object of desire of a landowning class not content any longer with just extracting half or more of the salary of their compatriots. The tourist brings money and, in exchange, they get a pantomime of culture, the set dressing of a play whose actors live outside the theater. The resident is alienated from their neighborhood for the sake of the tourist, who in turn is also denied what they're ostensibly paying for, which is visiting a different place where different people live. Of course, between the tourist and the resident, there is a gradient of severity, but neither gain anything meaningful. The only agent of the social relations of mass tourism that gains from this arrangement and is sufficiently incentivized to keep it this way is the local landowner and the capitalist who can enjoy highly flexibilized (read: precarious) service work from the old residents. 2.75 million Spaniards worked in the tourism industry last year.
"Guiris go home" is a popular reprise, as said earlier. It is shouted both by the mass of workers who are kicked out of their streets and by the small capital owners who are also unable to face the unsolidary predation of their bigger class siblings, those who run businesses unsuited for an area that has been designated by the major land owners, sometimes with the help of the municipal government, as one that will be used to cater to those millions upon millions of tourists. A proletarian reprise, if one were to imagine it, would strike at the actual radicular element of touristification. It would not look at the tourist but at the big and small capitalists who froth at the mouth at the idea of being able to hire the residents of a city for 39hrs a week in a contract of 30hrs in a shop that is only affordable to the tourist mass, and at the landowners, caseros, who are enabled to increase the rent of the peripheral housing slightly less than the rents of the center. This is a commonality anywhere that suffers from the illls of excessive tourist activity, tourists in the millions will only go where they are catered to. The chaining of a local population to the whims of tourist ebbs and flows in any form, from precarious hospitality work to coerced sex work (where it is worth mentioning the much more active role of the sex tourist in its perpetuation), only happens when land and capital owners are able to place their land and their workers into the relative niche that is mass tourism.
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