How many tourists can a city handle?

Every summer millions of tourists travel to the most famous European cities. For the local economy this means income and jobs, but for residents it often means crowds, noise and higher rents. Experts call this phenomenon overtourism.

Venice is perhaps the best-known example. Fewer than 50,000 people live in the historic city centre, but millions of visitors come every year. Many of them stay only a few hours and leave little money in the city. That is why since 2024 Venice, as the first city in the world, has been charging day visitors an entry fee of five euros on certain days. Critics believe that the fee has hardly reduced the crowds and that the city increasingly resembles an open-air museum. As early as 2021, after years of protests, the Italian government banned large cruise ships from the lagoon.

In Spain, the discontent of residents has led to mass protests in recent years. In the summer of 2024, thousands of demonstrators in Barcelona sprayed tourists with water pistols. They complained that mass tourism makes life in the city more and more expensive. There were also similar protests on the Canary Islands, where residents are demanding a limit on the number of tourists. For many young people the flats there are now too expensive.

One of the main problems is the short-term rental of flats via platforms such as Airbnb. When owners rent out their flats to tourists, they earn more than with long-term tenants. So fewer and fewer flats remain on the market for the local population, and prices rise. Barcelona therefore plans to abolish all of its roughly 10,000 licences for holiday flats by 2028. The European Union also adopted new rules, under which the platforms must share data with the authorities.

The large cruise ships are also a problem, as they can bring thousands of people to a small town in a single day. Cities such as Amsterdam and Dubrovnik therefore limited the number of ships that are allowed to dock there. Other measures are higher tourist taxes, bans on new hotels and campaigns that steer tourists to less well-known parts of the city.

However, many cities hesitate, because tourism brings a lot of money. The question is how to find a balance between the needs of guests and of residents.