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District studies how to reduce organized groups of guided visitors and how to temporarily ban access to crowded spaces
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The plenary session approves a plan to avoid excesses of foreigners in summer, between warnings from Collboni to Maragall not to embrace tourism-phobia
Until the pandemic, Barcelona debated how to deal with the excesses of tourism, focused during the health crisis on how to recover visitors and now faces, that they are returning in significant numbers, how to manage that return.
In reality, there are some parties that defend that these crowds must be controlled. Essentially, the partners of the Barcelona government, Barcelona en Comú and the PSC, with certain and relevant nuances, and ERC. But beyond the debates there is a plan, pending completion, because the council is trying to find out how far it can go on this issue.
Groups and spaces
Ciutat Vella has commissioned the municipal legal services to analyze how the crowds of tourists can be limited in the district, the epicenter of the presence of visitors in Barcelona. The order, made by the district councillor, Jordi Rabassa, who specified it in statements made this Friday, focuses on two aspects. One is the possibility of limiting the groups of tourists who walk through the area with a guide. For now, the council does not have the power to limit these groups, which in some streets and small spaces are especially annoying because they make it difficult for other people to pass.
The plenary approved in November to limit these groups to 15 people, but as often happens in municipal plenary sessions, it was more a gesture than anything else. In La Boqueria there is that limit, dictated with Xavier Trias as mayor, but it could be done because the market is a municipal space, not a public one. Now, Rabassa has urged the legal services to study how to achieve this limitation, which initially corresponds to the Generalitat.
Saint Philip Neri
The second front is, if possible, more complex: the possibility of closing spaces to the influx of passers-by in cases where agglomeration is observed. In Sant Felip Neri the access is closed with a tape when the school children go out to play. But for now it is not possible to do something similar in Montcada street, to give the example you cited Rabassa himself at Easter, when he denounced that the crowds of foreigners were unsustainable. The councilman cited in those messages that although this large influx benefited the sector, it was not positive for the city.
On the first case, that of the groups, there is a second debate that Rabasa puts on the table. Because The situation of official guides is not the same as that of those who are not, people who are located in tourist spots and gather large groups, right there or after advertising on the internet. It is not an illegal action, because its prohibition is not regulated, but it is illegal.
Collboni and the Ertos
In this context, in which the debate on how to act before the return of tourists is intensifying, ERC has taken an initiative to the municipal plenary for the government to approve a summer plan by which it sharpens the surveillance of the dysfunctions and illegalities associated with mass tourism. The initiative has been approved by Barcelona en Comú, the PSC and ERC, and defended by the president of the republican group, Ernest Maragall.
“We want a city with tourism, yes. We do not want a city that depends on tourism. Neither tourism phobia nor harmful overcrowding. A new course is needed, governance, a new vision. We cannot accept the return to unlimited growth that some proclaim, nor allow the illusion of degrowth without an alternative that others preach to prevail,” said Maragall.
The socialist Jaume Collboni He has answered him on behalf of the government of Ada Colau with a certain belligerence: “Be very careful about making a tourism-phobic speech, I see them tempted. It seems that he does not like that this is one of the most important industries in the city. It seems that they do not like that the 170,000 legal places are full & rdquor ;. He has also recalled how the city was during the hardest moments of the pandemic, without visitors, with “lowered blinds & rdquor; and employees of the tourism sector at home receiving fees.
But despite the tone, the PSC has voted in favor of the initiative, which calls for an urgent tender for the hiring and reactivation of the illegal accommodation visualization team, presenting the report on the municipal employment license of the public domain by organized groups of tourists, to limit them and promote the visit of other districts to decongest the center of Barcelona.
Rabassa and the PSC
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The debate has somewhat lacked the voice of the ‘commons’: sometimes in the debates councilors from both partners speak and sometimes only one. Rabassa underlines that his entire plan to find out how to stop the crowds is shared with his socialist partners and specifically with the Department of Tourism, directed by the mayor Xavier Marcé.
But those nuances mentioned above between partners became clear when Rabassa tweeted before the crowds of Holy Week: “The tourism business community is satisfied, but this situation does not contribute anything positive neither for the neighbors nor for the local economic activity & rdquor ;. A message far removed from that of Collboni, who this Thursday congratulated the sector for its “resilience & rdquor ;.