the word “tourismphobia”once seen as media exaggeration, began to describe for some time now a real climate: first were the massive marches and denunciations of unaffordable rents, then the jump to another guy of pressure (water guns, symbolic seals, terrace intervention) and then the extension of the unrest to iconic territories such as the Balearic Islands, where the protests in the middle of the high season sought precisely to hurt tourist visibility to signal that quantitative success had become a “non-living situation.”
Latest case in Valencia reveals that the situation is far from over.
Valencia as a symptom. At this time the video It has gone viral. The altercation between Dutch tourists on bicycles and young people in the historic center of Valencia (insults crossed, bikes on the ground, “tourists go home” versus “fuck you”) illustrates that the conflict has decreased, if possible, a step: It is no longer just political representation or organized protest, but direct friction in the saturated public space.
They remembered in Levante newspaper that the video alone does not explain the background. The neighborhood platform contextualized the incident within an act for the eviction of a social space, denouncing that “real violence” is not the shout but the eviction, the noise, the daily saturation and the conversion of basements into tourist monoculture. The reactions in networks (some demonizing the neighbors as barbarians who tarnish the image of reception, others asking that “if they don’t respect, don’t come”) confirm that the phenomenon has entered a more polarizing phase, where each episode serves to reinforce side narratives.
When it stopped being local. The demonstrations that occurred throughout Europe This summer they had a new nuance: they were no longer isolated cities in intermittent outbreaks but a coordinated mass that protests on the same day, against the same externalities and with recognizable symbols in circulation.
Suitcases dragged to make noise, cardboard boats as an allegory of cruises or posters in English directed at the royal emissary of unrest made visible that for many, tourism stopped being just money and became a structural conflict over the use of land, air, water, sleep and disposable income.
Housing as a trigger. The emotional thread that connects Barcelona, Palma, Lisbon, Genoa, Venice or Marseille is not ideological but material: the hard core is the house price and social displacement linked to the monetization of the square meter in terms of tourism. When an apartment converted into a vacation rental doubles the potential income of renting it to a resident, the incentive structure expel population without individual bad intention.
This displacement becomes more hurtful in island contexts or of historic centerwhere the supply cannot grow without damaging heritage or landscape, so the pressure It’s arithmetic: each hosted tourist competes with an expelled resident. that the conflict emerge in summer nor does it seem coincidental: the clash between external leisure and internal life It is maximum when the visitor demands speed, noise, density and carelessness, while the neighbor asks for sleep, shade, peace and access to basic goods.
Globalization of fed up. What happened this summer of 2025 (the simultaneous protests in Mediterranean cities) proves that the unrest stopped being isolated to become a pattern of functional region in which the South has been reconfigured as North recreational playground. The demands shared in all the demonstrations reveal a common goal: decrease in tourism, limits on cruises, quotas on flights, moratoriums on tourist apartments, taxation of foreign capital and veto of land uses that externalize costs.
If you also want, the political force of the phenomenon lies not so much in its radicality but in that is no longer marginal: social sectors that are not anti-system militants assume that tourism is a monoculture erodes civic resilience basics (residential market, mobility, access to services, quality employment) and that the gross profit of GDP does not compensate for erosion of the living conditions in the neighborhoods where the phenomenon is physically established.
No cheap solution. And in all cities the underlying equation is similar: tourism is tax revenue, export income and low-entry employment in a country that has not generated equivalent industrial substitutes, but its territorial concentration produces social losses not internalized. The irony is that limiting it implies cut visible GDPbut not modifying it means gradually destroying the raw material of the habitable city.
More simply put, success kills its own foundation. The Mediterranean arc went from competing to attract visitors in the 90s and 2000s to coordinating to contain them because the context of reference changed: when the limiting factor was employment, tourism was a solution, but when the limiting factor was land and housingtourism comes to form part of the problem.
Uncertain future. Thus, without intervention, the outcome could be the silent consolidation of two parallel cities coexisting in the same place: one for tourists (abundant, prohibitiveephemeral, instagramer) and another for expelled residents to cheaper and worse served peripheral crowns.
That pattern, in fact, already exists (Capo in Palermo converted in gastronomic park for visitors, Ciutat Vella in Valencia commercializedconverted Palma neighborhoods in decoration) and its deepening tends to become irreversible: when a street loses its base trade and their rents influence tourism, and as long as a solution is not found in the neighborhoods that absorb said impact, the videos like the one in Valencia They will not be an anomaly, they will be the symptom.
Image | Zoetnet (Flickr)
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