A new study has revealed that Barcelona is the most massified city by tourism in the whole world, with an average of 201,772 tourists per square km, and 916 tourists for every 100 inhabitants. That means that almost 90% of people in the city are tourists.
Just to get an idea of how many people this is: Barcelona is only 1 city (a pretty small city, too, when it comes to surface) and yet it receives more tourists than the whole countries of Australia and Brazil combined.
This is a huge problem for locals, who are expelled from their homes due to the touristic pressure and gentrification, where rents reach extreme heights that only wealthy foreigners can pay. As a result of the increase in tourism, Barcelona's quality of life has lowered drastically and inhabitants have become poorer (tourism creates low-wage temporary jobs that end up killing the other industries that paid better and had better conditions, at the same time that housing becomes too expensive for anyone who wants to live in it for whole months or years instead of short-term stays) and living in the city has become a nightmare for many, where loud tourists don't let the neighbours sleep, our services are over-saturated, pollution from cruise ships and planes cause hundreds of inhabitants every year to die a premature death, communities are erased as people are forced to leave their neighbourhoods which they can't afford anymore, and closing down of shops needed for locals to live in to be replaced for tourism-oriented shops.
And in this desperate context, the government is planning to destroy natural and agricultural areas to make the Barcelona airport even larger, increasing the destruction of what's left of the city and its community just to fulfil the capitalist expectation of eternal growth in a finite city with finite resources and to make money for a few.
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