The doorbell for Martino de Almada Pimentel’s home in Sintra, Portugal is hard to find, and he loves it. It’s a long rope that, when pulled, rings a letter bell on the roof that lets her know someone is outside the hillside mansion her great-grandfather built in 1914 as a monument to privacy.
That has been invaluable to Pimentel in this summer of “overtourism.” More than 3 million people visit the hills and castles of Sintra every year, long among Portugal’s wealthiest regions for its cool microclimate and scenery.
Travelers idling in traffic outside the sun-washed walls of Casa do Cypress sometimes spot the bell and pull the string because it’s funny. With the windows open, he could smell the car exhaust. The frustration can be felt by the 5,000 visitors a day who are forced to queue around the house as they crawl switchbacks on a single track to Pena Palace, the one-time retreat of King Ferdinand II.
“I’m more isolated now than during COVID,” the soft-spoken Pimentel, who lives alone, said during an interview on Verandah this month. “Now I’m trying to (not) go out. What I’m feeling: anger.”
It’s a story about what it means to be visited in 2024, when the coronavirus pandemic is expected to set global tourism records after shutting down most of life on Earth. Homelessness is increasing rather than leveling off, with protracted revenge travel, digital nomad campaigns and so-called golden visas being blamed in part for skyrocketing housing prices.
Anyone paying attention to this summer of “overtourism” is well aware of the growing effects around the world: traffic jams in paradise. Reports of Hospitality Workers Tents.
Venice, Italy, became the world’s first city in April Day tourists are charged Its historic canals and other attractions should be visited on peak days. The move is designed to combat overtourism and reduce the harmful impact large crowds can have on some of the city’s most vulnerable sites, while encouraging some tourists to visit at less busy times of the year.
Elsewhere, “anti-tourist” protests are aimed at humiliating visitors as they dine – or, as happened in Barcelona in July, dousing them with water pistols.
The demonstrations are an example of locals using the power of their numbers and social media to deliver an ultimatum to destination leaders: Get better at managing this problem or we’ll scare off tourists — who can spend $11.1 trillion a year. Housing prices, transportation and water management are all on the checklist.
Cue the violins and you’ll be clamoring for people like Pimentel who are comfortable enough to live in places worth seeing. But it’s more of a problem for the rich.
“Is not getting an ambulance or not being able to get groceries a problem for the rich?” Another resident of Sindra, Matthew Bedell, said there is no pharmacy or grocery store in the center. Commissioned by UNESCO District. “They don’t seem like rich people’s problems to me.”
The phrase generally describes the point where visitors and their money stop benefiting residents and start harming historic sites by desecrating historic sites, building massive infrastructure, and making life more difficult for those who live there.
It’s a hashtag that gives a name to the protests and hostility you’ve seen all summer. But look a little deeper and you’ll find knotty issues for locals and their leaders, none more universal than housing prices driven by short-term rentals like Airbnb from Spain to South Africa. Some destinations promote “quality tourism,” generally defined as visitors being residents and less drunken behavior, disruptive selfie-taking, and other questionable choices.
“Overtourism is arguably a social phenomenon,” according to a WTO analysis written by Joseph Martin Seer of the University of Western Sydney and Marina Novelli of the University of Nottingham. For example, in China and India, crowded spaces are socially acceptable, they wrote. “This suggests that cultural expectations of personal space and exclusive expectations differ.”
The summer of 2023 has been defined by travel chaos — airports and airlines are overflowing, passports are a nightmare for travelers from the U.S. Yet by the end of the year, signs abound that the COVID-19 rush of revenge travel will accelerate.
In January, the United Nations Tourism Organization predicted that global tourism would exceed records set in 2019 by 2%. By the end of March, more than 285 million tourists had traveled internationally, about 20% more than in the first quarter of 2023. Europe was the most visited destination. World Travel and Tourism Council Scheduled for April Of the 185 countries it surveyed, 142 will achieve record tourism, generating $11.1 trillion worldwide and creating 330 million jobs.
Besides money, there’s trouble in paradise this year, with Spain playing a major role in everything from water management issues to house prices and drunken tourist drama.
Protests erupted across the country in early March, with graffiti in Malaga urging tourists to “go f——— home”. Thousands of protesters have demonstrated in Spain’s Canary Islands against visitors and construction, which will drastically affect water services and drive up house prices. In Barcelona, ​​as tourists dined al fresco on Las Ramblas, protesters booed and splashed water on people they thought were spectators.
In Japan, where tourist arrivals spurred by a weak yen were expected to hit a new record in 2024, Kyoto banned tourists from some alleyways. The government imposed restrictions on people climbing Mount Fuji. In Fujikawaguchiko, a town that offers some of the best views of the mountain’s perfect cone, leaders set up a large black curtain in a parking lot to keep tourists from flocking. Tourists hit back by cutting holes in the screen at eye level.
Meanwhile, air travel has become more miserable, the U.S. government announced in July. UNESCO has warned of potential damage to protected areas. and Fodor’s” No 2024 list “He urged people to reconsider visiting distress hotspots, including sites in Greece and Vietnam and areas with water management problems in California, India and Thailand.
Yet hot spots have sought to capitalize on “de-touristing” drives, such as Amsterdam’s “Stay Away” campaign aimed at keeping young people partying. For example, the “Welcome to Mongolia” campaign was called from the land of Genghis Khan. Foreign tourist arrivals to the country increased by 25% in the first seven months of 2024 compared to last year.
Tourism is growing so quickly, in fact, that some experts say “overtourism” is outdated.
Michael O’Regan, a lecturer in tourism and events at Glasgow Caledonian University, argues that “overtourism” has become a buzzword that does not reflect the fact that the experience often depends on the success or failure of crowd management. It is true that many of the demonstrations are not aimed at tourists, but at leaders who allow local people who should benefit to become payers.
“There has been a backlash against the business models that modern tourism is built on and a lack of response from politicians,” he said in an interview. Tourism “came back quicker than we expected,” he allows, but tourists aren’t the problem. “There’s a global fight for tourists. We can’t ignore it. … What happens when we get more tourists? Destinations need more research.”
Virby Magella can describe exactly what is going on in her corner of Cindra.
Guests arriving at Casa do Valle, her hillside bed and breakfast near the center of the village, call Mahela distressed because they seem to switch between Sintra’s “erratic” traffic rules without notice.
“There’s a pillar in the middle of the road that goes up and down, and you can’t go forward because it wrecks your car, so you have to come down somehow, but you can’t turn around, so you have to go back. The road,” says Mahela, who has lived in Portugal for 36 years. “And then people get so frustrated that they come to our road, which has a sign that says ‘Authorized vehicles only.’ They block everything.”
No one disputes the idea that tourism development in Portugal requires better management. The WTTC The country’s tourism sector was forecast in April to grow 24% this year over 2019, create 126,000 additional jobs and account for 20% of the national economy. House prices are already driving large numbers of people out of the property market, driven in part by foreign investors and tourists seeking short-term rentals.
In response, Lisbon announced plans to halve the number of tuk-tuks allowed to ferry tourists out of the city and create more parking spaces for them after residents complained they were blocking traffic.
A 40-minute train ride to the west, Sintra’s municipality has invested in more parking outside the city and affordable youth housing closer to the center, the mayor’s office said. Sintra City Hall said via email that fewer tickets are now being sold for nearby historic sites. Pena Palace, for example, began this year allowing less than half of the 12,000 tickets sold per day in the past.
That’s not enough, the residents who organized Syndra, an association challenging City Hall, say it needs to start “putting residents first” with better communication. They want to know the government’s plan to manage guests at the new hotel being built to increase the number of overnight stays, as well as higher limits on the number of cars and visitors allowed.
“We are not anti-tourists,” the group’s statement said. “(Local leaders) are against intractable chaos.”
