Spain Diaries: Tourist go home

Going where I'm not wanted in Barcelona

Generally in life I pride myself on knowing where I’m not wanted and then as a rule, not going there. Be it a party, wedding or funeral, if I’m not invited I will not attend. But I do find being unwanted by entire cities a bit trickier, and when a couple of minutes walk from Park Güell I spot a wall with graffiti spelling out “tourist go home” in messy red writing, it gives me pause.

I am, even if I say that I’m going travelling rather than on holiday, even if I will endeavour to write something snarky about the place when I get home, even if I haven’t arrived on a cruise ship or have a selfie stick in my backpack, a tourist. I am here in Barcelona today and in a few days I will be gone. Until then I am here to eat your food, and to beat you to your regular seat in your favourite bar, and to get in the way when I have to stop suddenly because I don’t know where I’m going. I am here, in short, to take up space.

I could brush off that graffiti as just one person’s opinion. Perhaps it’s not the entire city of Barcelona that wants me to go home, rather just the person with ample access to cans of red spray paint. I’m sure if pushed we could make friends and they would see that despite my inescapable identity as a tourist I really am quite friendly.

But friendly as I am (and I really am a delight) Barcelona as a whole has been making it known recently that tourists are welcome, but they need to behave themselves. A couple of days before this encounter with the graffiti we go on a walking tour of the Gothic Quarter, a classic tourist activity, that meets in the Plaça de Catalunya each morning.

When we arrive to sign in it’s us and about six others, plus the two guides. But by the time the tour is ready to start it feels like half of Barcelona is there with us. We look like we have enough numbers to invade the Gothic Quarter, never mind just have a look around. This is why, it turns out, we have two tour guides.

Our group is so big we are going to be split up. Partly because trying to corral the small army that stands milling around chatting is clearly beyond one guide, but partly because it is the law. Barcelona had set a few months before new regulations specifying tour groups entering the city’s historic Gothic Quarter could not number more than 20.

Whether this includes the tour guide as well is a matter that even our guide, a tall glamorous local called Mindy, seems unsure of. And so as a group of 20, or 21, depending on who’s asking, we head straight for La Rambla.

Lots of cities that are also becoming quite full of tourists are enacting similar policies. Venice is about to start trialling a charge for daily visitors, though not those who live or work in the city, or those tourists who have stayed in the city overnight. Quite how this will be enforced is fuzzy, presumably some officers will walk around the city surprising people, asking them, “did you sleep in this city last night?” To which the only acceptable answer will be “I will tonight if you’re offering.”

And Amsterdam has introduced measures too, though more targeted. They have essentially told the nation of Great Britain that it doesn’t want their yobs anymore. Which to everyone in Great Britain sounds quite fair enough, since we don’t want them either. Stag parties are now heavily discouraged.

Both cities don’t allow cruise ships to dock in the city now either, though they really shouldn’t have been able to do this in the first place.

But back to Barcelona. It is crowded. Despite our tour group’s cunning plan of splitting up we’re one of many slightly-too-large groups that lurk on the streets of the old city. On La Rambla we battle through and often clash with other groups but also with waiters and city council workers and street hawkers, lots and lots of street hawkers.

There are loads of street hawkers in Barcelona but then this feels a churlish thing to complain about since the reason there are loads of street hawkers is that there are loads of tourists. There wouldn’t be any street hawkers if there weren’t any tourists. This is one of those rare areas in life where there truly is a cause and effect.

One evening on the beach down at La Barceloneta, as I lay there trying to read, there are two sounds almost entirely drowning out the rest. There is the sea, obviously, doing its thing, coming in and then going out or going out and then coming in. And then there are the street hawkers selling drinks, who announce this with an almost sing-song-like melody, “sangria mojitoooooo, mojito sangria.” All night this goes on and even long after I have left the beach the hawkers will have been there, singing their song, “sangria mojitoooooo, mojito sangria.”

I suppose this is the problem with cities or places that get loads of tourists. As I write this I am not on that beach in Barcelona but I bet those men are, singing their song. If not them, then someone else will be, doing the same thing.

And people find them annoying, people who live there and the people who visit. But the people who live in Barcelona will always have to put up with the street hawkers, and the tourists getting in their way, and the pickpockets that follow them, and the AirBnBs cropping up much faster than affordable housing, and the cruise ships ruining their water quality, and the crowds, the ever-moving yet ever-present crowds everywhere in their city and especially right in the centre. And when you put it this way you can sort of see why a man with a surplus of spray paint might decide to do some decorating in his local area to get his message across.

So eventually, I do what Barcelona’s budget-Banksy asks and go home. Though I was always planning to, and I’m sure just as I catch my train to leave, there’s a similarly annoying Englishman arriving ready to replace me. Tourists, in the end, never really do go home.

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Some housekeeping.

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