Barcelona, Venice and Amsterdam are among Europe’s favourite travel destinations and benefit greatly from tourism. However, the massive influx of visitors places a considerable burden on the cities and their inhabitants.

To counteract the negative effects of overtourism, these cities are taking decisive action. Following public protests, no new hotels may be built in Venice and cruise ships will have to use other moorings in future. Amsterdam has banned guided tours of its famous red light district in order to protect local residents. Paris is planning to ban coaches from the city centre in order to improve the quality of life. Other overcrowded cities are also trying to control the situation through various methods.

Do you think that overtourism is a serious problem in Europe?

Sources: National Statistics Offices, Statista, Le Monde, Forbes

  • trollercoasterEnglish
    10•5 months ago

    I’m living in a relatively small community that’s blessed with a few pleasant landscape features and unfortunately located relatively close between a bunch of major metropolitan areas. This leads to hordes of day trip tourists (many more than residents) descending upon us, predominantly on weekends or during school holidays, whenever the weather permits (mostly from late Spring to early Autumn). They will park their cars everywhere, often in front of residents’ driveways and garage doors, or in all the other other places where you have no business parking a car, then they will stumble through our indeed beautiful landscape for a couple hours, littering the whole place with their garbage and having a bunch of accidents that happen to people who go on a hike in rough-ish terrain without wearing the appropriate shoes, which requires quite some resources to deal with, because those accidents happen well away from easily accessible roads.

    Since they are only day trip tourists, they leave very little money, because there fortunately is no admission fee for having a walk out in nature. There are only a handful of tax paying businesses that even can profit from the day trip tourists: Two small kiosks which have little to no relevance to the local population, because they sell tourist refreshments for tourist prices in tourist locations, and two to three pubs/restaurants, one of which has by now gone full tourist trap and is charging prices no local is willing to pay anymore.

    There also is a slow but steady influx of wealthy city people buying houses or flats as a weekend retreat, spoiling the prices for and taking the places away from local families, and, on top of that, causing a bunch of trouble by filing a plethora of legal complaints about everything and anything that is normal life on the countryside, but is disturbing their precious peace and quiet. One resident has already been sued into getting rid of his backyard chickens, because the cock was crowing too loud for his new and temporary (weekends only) neighbour from the city. Traditional festivities that have been held for many decades, if not centuries, are getting hit by a bunch of noise complaints from weekend home dwellers, too.

    So, yes, overtourism is a problem for me personally, even if it is so only on a relatively small scale. I can easily imagine overtourism being an even bigger problem in other places that are affected by it. Overtourism can easily destroy the way of life of any place.