Unesco’s scolding of Venice should be read as a serious warning to all tourist cities, world heritage sites or not. Barcelona also has reasons to consider itself indirectly alluded to by criticism of overcrowding that ruins the tourist experience.
On the face of it, external supervision of this kind would not be bad for the Catalan capital. If the entire city were a world heritage site and its status was threatened, perhaps changes would be promoted that often go beyond the municipal sphere. For example, the limitation of cruises that only spend a few hours in the city. Or structural reforms to better control tourist rent.
But it is not the case. The city is bursting with tourists, and now even virtual visitors are added, such as the influencer Lil Miquela, an animation character who last week uploaded on Instagram (2.7 million followers) some photos in which she appears visiting the Boqueria and that they were a clear invitation to take the first flight to Barcelona. On the same network, the writer Jordi Carrión warned about his presence: “Because the millions of tourists are not enough, Lil Miquela announces the future invasion of digital people and robots”.
Barcelona today projects an image of a saturated city, to the point that one often begins to hear, in smaller cities, the phrase “at this point we will end up like Barcelona”. A warning that, formulated by some cities with voracious tourist development, raises a certain perplexity, because, in fact, they are already worse off than Barcelona, ??since the overcrowding is even more evident due to its size.
And what can Barcelona do to stop looking like this saturated Barcelona, ??but without renouncing tourism which is today its main source of income?
The Unesco report on Venice highlights two problems: overcrowding and the effects of warming. In the first area, Barcelona’s margin is limited: few cities in the world of its size have five kilometers of safe and well-maintained beach in the middle of the city center. Ancient and contemporary culture, architecture and design, gastronomy, good weather and atmosphere complete a dangerously attractive offer. Perhaps, first, it will be necessary to hit the ceiling (the new municipal economic manager, Jordi Valls, admits that this moment may have arrived) so that it is the sector itself that self-regulates and bets on quality to the detriment of quantity.
But alert. Although the good climate is included in the above list, there are indications that Barcelona’s climate may cease to be an advantage and become a drawback.
Although the climatic reasons for which Unesco criticizes Venice (the poor protection of the lagoon) do not apply to other cities, some leisure destinations in southern Europe would do well to take note. Because heat, drought and fire are a real threat to the future of tourism. Now that there is foreign press, such as the British ( The Sun, Financial Times ) starting to warn that the Spanish summer is no longer healthy due to its African temperatures, it will be necessary to send messages explaining what is being done to fight the problem
And Barcelona is better positioned than other cities to explain itself. At the outset, it would be necessary to continue progressing, without haste but with determination, in the environmentally friendly mobility policies that the city has been applying for years. Increasing urban vegetation, covering streets with panels, promoting an architecture adapted to the new reality, improving the network of climate shelters or enabling solutions so that there are no queues outdoors, are other measures that could be applied.
It is easy for Barcelona to differentiate itself, now that cities governed by the PP and Vox not only disagree with the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, but have incorporated climate denialism into their culture war.
