Cutting tourism will make Barcelona a city ‘to lead the future’

Barcelona’s tree-lined Rambla was once frequented by figures such as Picasso and Orwell and praised by the poet Lorca, who wished it would go on forever. However, some would now rather the avenue, synonymous with mass tourism and cheap beer, would just disappear.

The state of the street, the most notable artery of tourism in a city that draws more than 27 million visitors each year, epitomises much of what Ada Colau, the mayor, has battled during her eight years in office. It also signals a wider malaise gripping the city.

Colau has closed thousands of illegal tourist apartments rented out on sites such as Airbnb and banned further licences for them. She has also limited the number of hotel beds in the city and forbidden the opening of hotels in its centre. Now the mayor wants to reduce cruise ship visits to Barcelona’s port and opposes an extension of the airport.

“The great challenge is tourism. Barcelona is a very densely populated city, hemmed in between the mountains and the sea, with restricted space. We can’t take infinite numbers of tourists. There has to be a sense of limits and order,“ Colau told The Times. “We need homes. We need residents to live in the centre.”

To her critics Colau, 48, is a left-wing firebrand responsible for Barcelona’s “decline”. They say her tourism policy has damaged the economy, her green zones have worsened traffic congestion and that she has presided over a dirtier and less secure city.

A perception of decay reflects a moment of faltering self-confidence in a city until recently regarded as Spain’s most prosperous and thrusting.

Battered by the failed Catalan separatist campaign of 2017, after which it lost its position as Spain’s top economic powerhouse to arch-rival Madrid, Barcelona’s immediate fate will be decided at municipal elections in May, at which Colau will stand for a third term. She is neck and neck in the polls with her main rival.

Barcelona is closing some blocks to through traffic and introducing cycle lanes

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The former T-shirted activist, who was once dragged from a protest by riot police, relishes a fight and defends her record vigorously. The city’s first woman mayor is suited and at ease in the panelled office of Barcelona’s grand city hall but her genial manner belies a steely political will.

“We have imposed order on a chaotic tourism that was out of control, curbed real estate speculation, tackled a city full of cars and pollution and made housing a priority,” she said. “We need to consolidate what we’ve achieved in the last eight years, putting Barcelona in the vanguard of cities that want to lead the future, combating the climate crisis, the real estate crisis, and to avoid social fracturing.”

Her opponents claim Colau has been bad for business but that she and her coalition of far-left groups that runs the city’s minority government are now mute about separatism. In 2017, they had been in favour of holding a referendum on self-determination. Now they say they are against it “in the short term” and prefer not to talk about it.

Such has been the toll exacted by the separatist gambit – thousands of businesses moved their headquarters out of Catalonia, mainly to Madrid. An anecdote doing the rounds in business circles tells how aides to Xavier Trias, Colau’s chief rival in the mayoral race and a member of the hardline separatist Junts party, have told him not to mention independence during the electoral campaign.

Xavier Trias, the city’s former mayor, is hoping for a return to power. He says Barcelona is “out of tune”

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Barcelona’s citizens have more pressing concerns. More than 66 per cent said conditions had worsened in the past year, with security and dirty streets the top concerns, according to a municipal survey published in December.

Colau argues that growing concerns about insecurity reflect perception rather than reality, citing recent police statistics suggesting that theft decreased last year by 26 per cent and violent street robberies by 13 per cent compared with 2019.

“A city that has so much tourism attracts a certain type of crime above all robbery and theft, which are the most numerous crimes we have,” she said. She added that a law had finally been reformed by Madrid so that repeat offenders of thefts could be imprisoned. On the dirtiness of the city the mayor conceded there had been problems relating to a change of contractor but that they had been resolved.

But her flagship policy is also under fire. Beyond the old walls that confine the city hall, diggers and workmen in the Eixample district race to complete a key phase of her ten-year plan to transform the city centre. The works are part of the “superblock” scheme that closes city blocks to through traffic and introduces cycle lanes, play areas and green spaces.

With an area of 100 sq km and 1.6 million inhabitants, Barcelona is one of the densest cities in Europe. “We can’t live with pollution. We have to reduce traffic. There are several thousand premature deaths every year in Barcelona due to pollution. That obliges us to act,” said Colau.“We are planting 8,000 trees and in eight years we have created 80 hectares of new green areas.”

Hailed by some as a pioneering solution to modern city scourges of pollution and traffic, its first phase was inaugurated in 2016. The Eixample district is its controversial focus. An elegant grid of 19th-century residential blocks, it was the brain-child of Ildefons Cerdà who designed it to break out of the old city walls when the population density was double that of Paris. Barcelona was also blighted by industrial pollution.

Like then, when Cerdà’s enlightened plans were slammed as “one of the horrors of the world”, Colau’s proposals face trenchant opposition. Her detractors say they have moved congestion to other streets and that their economic impact has not been assessed. The city’s residents are roughly divided between those who support the scheme and those who oppose it, according to a poll published last month.

Colau says a plan to expand Barcelona airport would bring in 20 million more tourists for whom there is no space

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Some say that it has impeded mobility across the city for workers coming daily from poorer areas outside. “The point is that if you want to change the infrastructure of the city you have to have a healthy debate about it,” said Jordi Canals, a professor of corporate management at the IESE Business School in Barcelona. “The policy implemented has been rather mediocre.”

Canals added that Colau “plays upon populist issues” such as new bicycle lanes – she has pleased many by doubling the extent of them – but has been part of the “Barcelona of no”, which has restricted business and big infrastructure projects. Along with the separatist movement the stance had increased the decline of direct foreign investment in the city, he contended.

He pointed to her opposition to the extension of the airport. Colau fulminates against it. “The central government says the plan would increase from 50 million to 70 million visitors. Around 20 million more visitors who are going to be basically tourists,” said Colau. “Where are they going to go? The citizens of Barcelona are not going to have space.”

So far, she added, she had managed to stave it off but last week the Catalan government, which has blocked the project since 2021 because of environmental concerns, struck a deal with the country’s ruling Socialists to study increasing the airport’s capacity.

Colau sees the airport as a failed model of “monoculture” tourism and wants to diversify to other spheres, citing the tech industry. She also objects to the cruise ships that stop at the port. “Forty per cent of the cruise ships stop for four hours. They don’t give the city economic return, and thousands of people disembark, create great mobility issues and then leave,” she said. “It’s an industry we have to limit.”

Barcelona’s tree-lined Rambla was praised by the poet Lorca but the mayor says tourists have chased residents out of the city’s centre

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For some this grates and adds to their view of her as a negative force. Her enemies are legion. Property investors resent her requirement that 30 per cent of any new private residential projects be public housing too. They say it deters private capital.

Her chief opponent, Trias, 79, a former mayor, who is doing marginally better than Colau in the polls, is preparing his return. Barcelona, he recently said, “doesn’t sound good, it is out of tune”. The city, he added “is like a great orchestra that has had a bad conductor and a bad score”.

Colau is defiant, pointing out that tech start-ups are booming – companies such as Amazon are still setting up operations in the city – and that events including the Mobile World Congress, whose presence in the city she once opposed, are choosing Barcelona.

“We have not stopped being international references in many things,” she concludes. “We are the only ones who have a plan for the future, we have a model for the city. The other political groups criticise it but they offer no alternative.”