The 2024 tourist season has seen a record number of vacationers flock to the most popular leisure destinations across Europe. And in many locations, visitors have been greeted with protests against their presence, a sign of the growing backlash against the negative effects of mass tourism. The movement is creating a dilemma for local politicians and policymakers in locations that rely on the revenue and employment that tourism generates.
Technically, the anti-tourist movement in Europe is not new. In fact, it first emerged in the mid-19th century, born from romanticist concerns about the integrity of pristine heritage sites. French novelist Gustav Flaubert famously lambasted “the English imbeciles” who altered Egypt for the worse, while English writer John Ruskin bemoaned what he saw as hordes of working class people defiling the Lake District. The contemporary iteration of the movement, though, is rooted in the explosion of mass tourism that began in the 1960s, when southern Spain, in particular, saw a meteoric rise in international visitors from the rest of Europe.
The widespread backlash seen today began to take hold in the years immediately preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, as record-high levels of tourism in Europe started to provoke an anti-tourist backlash, most prominently in Spain. Far from dispelling the sentiment driving the backlash, the pandemic gave fresh legs to it, as local residents in tourist destinations got a brief taste of a more peaceful life without the negative consequences of mass tourism. The prolonged travel restrictions also created enormous pent-up demand, which meant that post-pandemic tourism across the Mediterranean swelled to unprecedented levels, reigniting the protest movement, which is now more organized and more intense than before.