The popular Spanish holiday hotspot of Malaga has been declared “in crisis” as over-tourism protests rocked Spain this summer.
“I’ve been working for twenty years on the relationship between historic centres and tourism. In Malaga, there was love at first sight, but right now it is in crisis,” said Prof Lourdes Royo Naranjo from the University of Seville’s Faculty of Architectural History, Theory and Composition.
On Friday, she spoke at the conference in Palma de Mallorca on tourism and historic cities and identified how the profile of tourists has changed over the last few decades.
A century ago, a traveller got to know a destination in depth and became immersed in its unique culture. Now, cities have become the victim of fleeting visits, internationalism and the settings for compulsive snapshots on Instagram, the professor said.
Prof Naranjo spoke specifically on the issues facing the mainland coastal town of Malaga as well as Seville, though the issues being faced there are similar to those in Majorca’s towns.
“We are going through a bad period, the benefits are out of control, and there are imbalances. Destinations have become objects of desire but are showing signs of fragility and exhaustion, and coexistence is suffering,” she argued.
She continued: “There are common consequences at a sociological, architectural, urban and anthropological level. There is great unrest and the concerns are the same.”
Historic centres, Prof Naranjo argued, have become products: “Tourism is an industry that consumes the city. There is a mass that goes to the destination and there is a theatricalisation of the historic centre.”
Tourist pressure is not the only issue that she highlighted. There are also problems of gentrification, coexistence and the replacement of traditional housing and shops.
“Given all this, it is natural that there is a rejection by residents because there is conflict. The right to housing and rest are compromised,” Prof Naranjo argued.
This summer, Spain has been inundated with protests in some of its most popular travel destinations. In April, tens of thousands of people came together in the Canary Islands to protest the negative impacts of mass tourism.
Locals sprayed tourists with water pistols in Barcelona, while in Majorca, residents took over beaches with their beach towels in an attempt to take back control from tourists.
A new YouGov Eurotrack survey which looked at several European countries found that almost half of Spaniards (49 percent) said there are “large” numbers of international tourists in their local area, with 32 percent saying their local area receives “too many” foreign travellers. Among Britons, by contrast, this figure stands at between just five and seven percent.
The biggest issue Prof Naranjo highlighted is the current tourism model in Spain: “The model has failed and we have to stop and think about how to change the management. The identity of cities is being distorted.
“They are all the same, due to the same multinationals and the modification of facades. Tourism consumes, exhausts and is capricious. When they [tourists] tire of our cities, we will have a serious problem.”