Barcelona Is Fighting Back Against Tourists
If you’re planning a trip to Barcelona, there’s something you need to know before you book.
The city is at war – not with a foreign enemy, but with its own tourism industry. And in the past two years, that war has gotten very personal for American visitors.
Water Guns, Blockades, One Terrified U.S. Dad
In June 2025, Patrick Flomo flew to Barcelona with his 10-year-old son for a vacation.
He ended up trapped inside his hotel while protesters outside blockaded the entrance with tape, fired water guns, and scuffled with guests trying to get back in.
“I was terrified,” he told reporters. “I am not coming back here again. Why are they doing this?”
The Numbers That Explain Everything
Barcelona has 1.6 million residents.
In 2024, it received 26 million tourists.
That’s 16 visitors for every single person who actually lives there.
Over the same decade that tourism exploded, housing costs in the city rose by more than 60%.
At one protest, a social worker held up a sign saying she lives in a 23-square-meter apartment – roughly the size of a large American living room – and pays €715 a month for it.
Spain as a whole welcomed 94 million international visitors in 2024, nearly double its entire population of 48 million.
Your Holidays, My Misery
The protest movement started in April 2024 in the Canary Islands and spread fast.
By July 2024, thousands were marching through Barcelona’s streets chanting “Tourists go home” and “Barcelona is not for sale.”
Protesters sealed hotel exits with tape. They cordoned off restaurant terraces, some still full of diners. Others sprayed tourists eating on the Las Ramblas promenade with water guns.
In April 2025, activists blocked a tourist bus near the Sagrada Família and covered the windshield with a tarp reading: “Let’s put out the tourist fire.”
By June 2025, the movement had gone continent-wide. Coordinated protests hit Barcelona, Mallorca, Granada, Ibiza, Venice, Lisbon, Milan, Naples, and Palermo on the same day.
One Barcelona protester explained his water gun to a reporter. “The squirt guns are to bother the tourists a bit,” explained a 42-year-old local in Barcelona. “Barcelona has been handed to the tourists. This is a fight to give Barcelona back to its residents.”
What the City Is Doing About It
Barcelona’s mayor, Jaume Collboni, has been under enormous pressure to act.
In June 2024, he announced one of the most aggressive moves any European city has made: all 10,101 short-term tourist rental licenses in Barcelona (every Airbnb, every VRBO, every holiday flat) will expire permanently in October 2028 and will not be renewed.
Spain’s Constitutional Court upheld the ban in March 2025, dismissing Airbnb’s legal challenge.
In 2026, it’s already impossible to get a new tourist license in Barcelona. The only way to operate a legal short-term rental is to own a property that already holds one of the existing licenses – and those are on a hard countdown to extinction.
Fines for operating without a license can reach €600,000.
Spain also ordered Airbnb to remove more than 65,000 listings that violated registration rules nationwide. Courts upheld an additional €65 million fine against the platform in late 2025.
Beyond rentals, Barcelona raised cruise passenger fees, and removed a major tourist bus route to Park Güell from Google Maps (which noticeably reduced congestion there).
Catalonia plans to raise hotel surcharges to €6.75 per night for four and five-star properties.
If You’re Planning to Visit
None of this means Barcelona is closed to tourists.
But the accommodation picture is changing fast. Airbnb options in the city have already dropped more than 20% since 2018.
By 2028, they’ll be gone entirely, replaced by hotels – of which Barcelona is building thousands of new rooms, mostly outside the city center.
If you were counting on a holiday apartment in the Gothic Quarter or Barceloneta, you’ll want to rethink your options now rather than later.
The protest movement also shows no signs of stopping. June is the flashpoint season. Travelers heading to Barcelona in summer should know that demonstrations, sometimes targeting tourist areas directly, are now a regular feature of the city.
A 38-year-old social worker at the June 2025 protests said it plainly: “It is the fault of mass tourism that we cannot find affordable housing or go to eat in affordable places. Shops are full of souvenir rubbish.”