The water pistols are back. On Sunday a wave of co-ordinated anti-mass tourism protests took place across southern Europe, from Lisbon to Venice via Palma de Mallorca. The Barcelona marches saw several hundred turn out. Flares were thrown into hotel lobbies. A hostel was taped off like a crime scene. Tourist or not, if you happened to be sitting at a café terrace in the Spanish city’s Gothic Quarter that day, you had a high chance of getting spritzed.
It’s hard to argue with the demonstrators’ points. Tourism, particularly the proliferation of short-term lets such as Airbnbs, is pushing up rents, exacerbating the housing crisis and forcing locals out of their own neighbourhoods. It is also changing the character of some of Europe’s most magnificent cities. Historic restaurants and family-owned businesses are vanishing; in their place emerge yet more gaudy fast-food chains, bubble tea shops and vape stores. If that’s your vibe, you may as well spend the weekend walking up and down Oxford Street.
Much needs to change, clearly, but the emphasis hasn’t always been in the right place. Mitigation tactics appear to come in one of two forms: either a) curbing visitor numbers through headline-making policies such as tourist taxes, limiting cruise ship arrivals or even a complete ban on short-term rentals, which Barcelona plans to enforce from 2028; or b) suggesting travellers try “destination dupe” alternatives instead (Catalan neighbour Girona is the go-to when it comes to Barça-alikes, which I’m sure they love there). But I’m not convinced tourists are going to stop wanting to visit these cities in significant numbers. They are popular for a reason — the art! The architecture! The mini beers and salty snacks! — and shouting or graffitiing “go home” or “go elsewhere” is unlikely to work.
So here is my proposal: send them to the suburbs. One city that is trying to pre-empt and stave off overtourism is the small but increasingly popular Ghent, whose tourist board is promoting what it calls “spreading” — trying to distribute visitors throughout the city rather than having them concentrated in the historic centre. As anyone who’s visited Ghent will know, it’s a good 40-minute walk from the main train station to the city’s central attractions, so it would make complete sense for more visitors to stay overnight throughout this vast urban stretch instead of just the medieval core, which is what most tourists do (especially considering the city’s impressive cycling infrastructure). It is now encouraging visitors to spend more time in less visited areas such as Dampoort, and wants more hotels to open city-wide.
• 16 of the world’s most underrated cities
To take the example of an already overtouristed city, I can vouch for staying beyond Paris’s Boulevard Périphérique. The suburb of Pantin, where I lived for six months (mainly because of the low rent), has all the edge of other northeastern areas within the ring road (the star turns being a host of canalside bars, dance theatre the Centre National de la Danse and the charming independent cinema Ciné 104). But you also get the sense of staying somewhere a lot more authentically French. Who needs the Pompidou Centre when you’ve got a massive E.Leclerc hypermarché on your doorstep?
For some cities, such as Barcelona, where tourism has reached such excessive levels that even the suburbs are sick of visitors, this might not be appropriate. But I have a back-up solution: commute. Faced with absurd hotel and Airbnb rates over Valentine’s Day, I gave this a go in comparably overrun Amsterdam. We ended up in someone’s garage in a seaside town called Zandvoort. The daily 20-minute train ride through a national park and Haarlem was gorgeous, and in the evenings we felt like the only Brits in town, doing our bit for the local economy at a time of year when it sees little custom. Similarly, this weekend, I’m off to a hotel in the mountains outside Alicante in Spain, and plan to pop into the city for tapas and a museum visit or two. I won’t take it personally if they spritz me.
What are your favourite city suburbs to stay in? Let us know in the comments
