If you have visited Barcelona recently, you might have noticed something unusual going on.

Since the early summer, central hotspots such as La Rambla and neighbourhoods such as Gracia and Parc Guell have featured graffiti with the words “Tourists go home”. It’s all part of the same picture. Barcelona locals have been protesting against mass tourism.

On July 6, a demonstration was held in which (according to organisers) between 10,000 and 15,000 people took to the streets (police estimates put the figure at around 3,000). Some even targeted individual tourists, spraying them with water pistols as they drank coffee or ate lunch and cordoning off hotels and restaurants with red tape as they ‘reclaimed’ territory for themselves.

It drew international attention to a problem that has been on the minds of many residents for years. Now, with a consolidated movement raising awareness and taking action, Barcelona’s politics and daily life are beginning to reflect this new perspective — and the city’s most famous football club is watching with interest.

Barcelona start every season with a home friendly when they contest the Joan Gamper Trophy. The tradition dates back to the mid-1960s and pays homage to Gamper, one of the club’s founders back in 1899.

The match is always played in early August, so there are plenty of foreigners among the attendees. This year, Monaco were the visitors (and they beat Barca 3-0 — though any sore feeling over that result has been forgotten in Barca’s strong start to the new league season).

On the route up to Barca’s temporary home on Montjuic (they have been playing at the Estadi Olimpic Lluis Companys since the start of last season while extensive renovations are made to the Camp Nou), leaving from Plaza Espana and taking advantage of the escalators that help you reach the stadium, several tourists spoke with The Athletic about their experience in the city.

Stuart, a 34-year-old from England, said he thought tourists were being treated “unfairly”. He said he “understood the anger and frustration of residents” but thought it was “being misdirected” because “the problem lies with the government and they need to find a solution”.

Another was Giulia, a 34-year-old Italian who has lived in Barcelona for a few years.

“When I first saw the graffiti it made me feel like I wasn’t welcome,” she said. “But I understand that people are p**sed off because I am, too.

“There are always drunk people, normally from England or Germany, screaming without their shirts on. Would you go out in the street in your home town like that? This is not Disneyland. People live here.”

Street graffiti in Barcelona – Guiri is a colloquial term for a badly behaved or obnoxious tourist (Paco Freire/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Marti Cuso has been involved in organising the demonstrations through his role with a residents’ association representing Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, a central area of the city extremely popular with visitors.

“The responsible party is not the tourist who comes to Barcelona and who wants to go to see a Barca game,” he says. “The responsible party is the whole economic system.

“What we have been denouncing for years is the ‘touristification’ of the economy. Tourism has a very strong negative impact on the lives of residents. It leads to housing shortages with flats turned over to holiday lets, rising prices, degradation of heritage, pollution and the erosion of labour rights. A change must be proposed to reduce the weight of tourism in the city’s economy.

“Flight prices are increasing and the low-cost airlines will disappear. When oil becomes scarce in 20 or 30 years, what will happen to international mobility? We have a city that depends on 30million visitors. We have to generate economic alternatives and do it in a planned way.

“The graffiti alone does not help to make people understand this, although it’s true that it has contributed to the mediatisation of the problem. But some take it very personally, as if we were attacking them. The least you ask of the tourist is that they know that there is a conflict with this, but you should never point directly to them as being responsible.”

Tourists find themselves caught up in the July 6 protest in Barcelona (Josep Lago/AFP via Getty Images)

Tourism is extremely important to Barca. There are many other reasons to visit Barcelona — for the food, the climate, the architecture, art and beaches — but among the many who do come here, its world-famous football club also ranks highly on the to-do list.

Barca’s museum is the most visited in Catalonia and the third most visited in Spain. Club sources — who, like all those cited here, preferred to speak anonymously to protect relationships — told The Athletic that on average 52 per cent of match tickets are sold to people from outside Spain. Over their most recent season at the Camp Nou (2022-23), their ticketing revenue was €71.6million (£60.3m; $79.3m at current rates), of which €37.3m came from tickets sold to tourists. All of this made the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic especially destructive.

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The importance of tourism to Barca has already caused some tensions among the club’s fans. Last season, they introduced a new policy that penalised season ticket holders who did not release their seats for resale if they were unable to make it to a game. It did not go down well with a section of Barca’s ‘socios’ (club members). For the 2023-24 campaign, just 17,552 of the 80,274 who had season tickets at the Camp Nou decided to take up seats at the Lluis Companys.

Protesters in Barcelona – demonstrations have also taken place in other parts of Spain (Paco Freire/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Barcelona’s City Council has already outlined steps in response to growing pressure on mass tourism.

“Our will and commitment to limit tourist massification and its consequences for the city is firm,” said mayor Jaume Collboni (of Spain’s Socialist Party) after the demonstration in July.

A month earlier, Collboni spoke of plans to eliminate more than 10,000 short-term holiday lets, such as those available on Airbnb, by November 2028, returning them to residential use. Limiting tour groups to 20 people, increasing the tourist tax surcharge to €4 a night and setting up a specific plan for the management of heavily visited sites, such as the area around the Sagrada Familia, are other measures in the works.

Barca sources say the club is keeping a close eye on the situation around recent protests. They said they consider themselves affected by any negative news that might make a tourist decide against travelling to the city.

Cuso and the residents’ association he represents are sceptical on two counts. First, they don’t think the measures outlined by local politicians are far-reaching enough (and they also suggest some may not be achievable given the next municipal elections are scheduled for 2027). Second, they do not think the recent protests and graffiti will have any lasting effects on how many people choose to come to Barcelona.

“Nobody will stop coming because of four water pistols,” says Cuso. “The Spanish and foreign media is generating a discourse of fear and it is something that responds to the desire to discredit the protests and their underlying arguments.”

But he does worry more about the impact of mass tourism for Barca fans.

Eintracht Frankfurt celebrate victory over Barca in April 2022 (David S. Bustamante/Soccrates/Getty Images)

On Apri 14, 2022, Eintracht Frankfurt visited Barca in the second leg of their Europa League quarter-final. Visiting fans were officially granted 5,000 tickets. In the end, about 30,000 supporters from Germany made it into the ground — the attendance was 79,468.

It caused great embarrassment to Barca. Since then, measures have been taken to stop a repeat from happening — such as blocking online ticket sales from foreign IP addresses on European matchdays, or not allowing rival colours to be worn in sections reserved for home fans.

More recently, speaking before last weekend’s La Liga match between Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao at Montjuic, visiting manager Ernesto Valverde was asked what kind of atmosphere he expected. He replied: “It’s summer, there will be a lot of tourists, so I don’t expect anything special.”

It is a point Cuso associates with the wider trends of too much tourism.

“Now when you watch a Barca game, every day you have someone different next to you, someone who doesn’t know the chants and who is more interested in taking photos and recording reels for Instagram than in the match itself. This completely depersonalises the experience and betrays the whole identity of what it was like to go to the Camp Nou in the 1990s or 2000s.

“The club has clearly positioned itself as a global brand and is playing this game. But Barca is not a company, even if it behaves like one. They are an exception in the world of football (in that it is one of several which are member-owned). Now in the reform of Camp Nou, they are including more VIP boxes and lounges, which will surely cost thousands of euros. This is the model towards which everything is moving.”

The new Camp Nou will hold 105,000 people. The stadium is not scheduled to be fully completed until the summer of 2026, but Barca are expected to return there before the end of this year at a reduced capacity of 64,00 — although they say they cannot guarantee an exact timeframe.

An increased capacity should mean good news for the many thousands of people on the waiting list for a season ticket, although Barca sources say it has not been fully decided how many extra will be made available.

But one idea is to reserve a proportion for general ticket sales — with the city’s tourists again firmly in mind.

(Top photo: Getty Images. Visual design by Eamonn Dalton)