BARCELONA’S mayor, Jaume Collboni, has said the city cannot become a ‘theme park without residents’ and cannot continue with an unbridled growth in tourism.
Barcelona City Council last month said it would end all short-term tourist lets by 2028 to contain soaring rental prices for residents.
Socialist mayor, Jaume Collboni, said he would continue efforts to limit accommodation as visitor numbers are projected to rise between three and eight per cent a year which ‘no city could absorb’.
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“If you have a theatre with a 300-seat capacity, you cannot sell 500 tickets even if you have 200 people queuing… everything has a limit,” Collboni told the Reuters news agency.
Last year, 26 million tourists visited the city with a 1.6 million population.
“Tourism needs to be serving the city’s model, not the opposite. That’s what we are doing in Barcelona,” Collboni added.
Visitors increasingly favour renting holiday homes when travelling, with short-term rentals by foreign tourists in Spain up by 24 per cent between March and May, according to tourism industry association Exceltur.
Collboni has ruled out relaxing the the proposed ban, which he defends as legal and pointed to an opinion poll showing that 75 per cent of Barcelona residents are in favour
He also has no plans to ease an existing ban on opening new hotels in the city centre, and will raise the tourist tax on cruise ship passengers staying less than 12 hours .
The goal, he said, is to stop sea arrivals growing after reaching a record 3.6 million cruise passengers in 2023.
Collboni also branded a recent water-spraying protest as ‘totally reprehensible’ and not representing Barcelona’s spirit, arguing that all tourists were welcome and the protests should not scare off visitors.
