Barcelona fights back against the Britons behaving badly
Once it was a pretty fishing village on the outskirts of Barcelona. Then,
after the 1992 Olympics and gentrification, the tourists came — many of them
British and many of them behaving badly.
Last week, residents decided enough was enough: the fashionable neighbourhood
of Barceloneta was not going to become another magnet for stag and hen
parties. Impromptu protests involving 200 residents began a week ago and
have continued daily. Outside one of the flats rented to holidaymakers
10 things we learned this week | World news | theguardian.com
Barcelona’s residents have had it with drunk tourists
The naked Italians in Barcelona Vicens Forner
It all started with three drunk Italian men swanning through
Barcelona’s La Barceloneta area in the nude for three hours. They even
popped into a shop, much to their own amusement. The incident was the final straw for residents
and around a hundred of them took to the streets in several spontaneous
protests this week, demanding that the local government do more to help
stop “drunken tourism”.
More than 7.4 million tourists visited Barcelona in 2012, compared with the city’s population of 1.6 million.
“We’re tired of low-cost, drunken tourism,” Oriol Casabella, head of
the La Barceloneta neighbourhood association, told the Guardian. “It’s
killing our neighbourhood and dissuading other types of tourists. It’s
Magaluf all over again.”
“Imagine that you’re in a tiny house, with three children, unemployed
with no money for vacations and you have to put up with the screams and
fiesta of tourists next door,” resident Andrés Antebi said. “It’s
unbearable.”
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