Transcription
And what if I told you that your vacations could be ruining the place you visit. Tourist go home, enough already, we want to live in our homes. These are some of the slogans that the residents of cities like Malaga, Barcelona, or Mallorca have been shouting for some time. A millionaire business that does not stop growing and that in its path devastates the native culture and increasingly generates more rejection among locals. Every day it is more normal to see endless queues to take a photo at the destination you cannot miss this summer or Spanish beaches that have to limit capacity because mass tourism is destroying them. What was once synonymous with development and openness has become a threat to daily life, local culture, and the environment. Is a model that is killing precisely what it sells sustainable? Today, in the world order, we are going to analyze if the tourism industry has reached a point of no return. Spain could surpass France for the first time and become the country with the most tourism in the entire world. International tourism shows signs of recovery despite the global crisis climate. Tourism has been the engine that has pulled us out of the crisis. Tourism has recovered this Easter week. Tourism, Tourism, tourism, tourism, tourism in the last 10 years has dominated the upward trend in employment. It is impossible to understand the impact of tourism without first analyzing its importance in our societies and, above all, in our economy. In 2024, nearly 10 billion international tourists were registered worldwide with total revenues of 1.6 trillion US dollars. Tourism is, without a doubt, one of the most important industries in the world. According to OECD data, it accounts for an average of 4.4% of gross domestic product, 6.9% of employment, and more than 20% of service exports. But there are countries and countries and specific cases where these figures skyrocket. Spain is the most extreme example. It is the second most visited country in the world, only behind France. The difference is that France has 20 million more inhabitants than Spain, but in terms of tourists, it only leads us by 7 million. That is, relatively speaking, Spain receives many more tourists. With 94 million visitors in 2024 and about to reach 100 million in 2025, tourism represents 13.4% of GDP and 12.9% of employment. A very dangerous dependence. This is not something new, although the number of visitors grows every year, the truth is that the tourism industry in Spain has been generating similar figures for quite some time. We have images from the beginning of tourism in Spain in 1950. On that date, more than 1,000 North American, Norwegian, Belgian, English, and Canadian tourists disembarked at the port of Barcelona. Through the French border, thousands of cars pass every day to the peninsula heading to areas like San Sebastián and mainly in months like August. With the slogan Spain is different, or in other words, Spain is different, the Spanish trend is growing. Tourism becomes in the 1960s a first-order economic activity in our country. In any case, Spain's relationship with tourism is nothing new. In fact, Spain has been one of the great drivers of mass tourism that we see all over the world today. Spain's emergence as a tourism power occurred between the 1950s and 1960s. The world was in a period of economic growth after World War II. The development of transportation, the advent of television. All this gave the starting signal to tourism as a mass phenomenon. And of course, Francoist Spain took advantage of this boom to break international isolation. The Ministry of Information and Tourism was created. The first National Tourism Plan was launched in the purest style of "Tourist Welcome." The country opted for economic opening, trade liberalization, all to welcome our guests. The hippies arrived in Spain. The Franco regime launched the "Spain is different" campaign in the 1960s to promote the Spain brand, and we began to see how, little by little, the first coastal resorts, hotels, and airports were built. Society began to see tourism as something very positive that brought openness, money, and new future perspectives to the country. In fact, if you like cinema, you will surely like the film "El turismo, es un gran invento" by Alfredo Landa, which is also a very clear example of how this tourist boom was viewed in Spain. Swedes, modernity, the revolution was expanding along the entire Spanish coast. Tourism, tourism, tourism. A magic word that is on everyone's lips today and that yesterday, although it was already in the dictionary, no one knew what it meant. For you, all this has been done. Decidedly, tourism is a great invention. This strategy basically drove and established the Sun and Beach model in Spain and gave us that image of an exotic and affordable destination internationally. It is a strategy that clearly worked, and little by little, tourist centers like Benidorm, Mallorca, or the entire Costa del Sol were developed, but also work dynamics and infrastructures focused precisely on this increasing tourism. And of course, seeing the success of this Spanish model, other countries decided to jump on the bandwagon to profit. Turkey, France, Greece, Egypt, or Germany have imitated the model of affordable luxury resorts in beach areas in the purest Spanish style. Despite the rampant success of the tourism model, we are seeing how the goose that lays the golden eggs is starting to get sick. Dependence on sun and beach has left obsolete infrastructure, overly saturated areas like the Canary Islands, seasonal, precarious jobs. There is a series of problems that this mass tourism has, which we see very clearly today. Firstly, the overcrowding itself. We are not only talking about crowded beaches, but also, for example, about endless queues, about the arrival of many tourists to places of interest or that have become fashionable that year on social media. For example, have you heard of the Maspalomas Dunes? This famous desert of dunes next to the Sea of Gran Canaria went viral in 2024, and the truth is it couldn't have been worse. Three YouTubers decided to hide a chest with €1,000 among the Maspalomas dunes. This caused what has been labeled an environmental attack. Tens and tens of people arrived in the area to dig with shovels and look for the money, which ended up destroying the desert ecosystem. This is just an anecdote, but it helps us understand what happens in places like the Canary Islands, which suffer the consequences of millions of tourists annually. And it is that this small Spanish archipelago receives more tourists than all of Brazil. You surely also recognize the images of the endless queues to climb Everest, but this is not the only case. In Peru, the mountain of seven colors, for example, is currently a must-see if you visit the country. In about 2 years, it went from receiving a few dozen visitors to nearly 1,000 per day. Overcrowding not only affects remote places that many people visit in a short time, but it also generates a problem at the urban level. Imagine living in Venice, 50,000 inhabitants and 20 million tourists a year. For every resident, you find 400 tourists. In fact, Venice is literally sinking, and tourism is accelerating that dark path. Think that it is a city built on water, and its tourism depends heavily on boats, both for getting around and for the visits themselves. And what happens? That the more boats, the more movement there is in the water. This erodes the seabed on which the city is built, meaning it is sinking much more. But we don't even need to go that far. Barcelona, for example, receives the same number of tourists, more than 20 million per year. And many of these tourists arrive by cruise ship. That is, we are talking about up to 10,000 people arriving by cruise ship at once in the center of a city of 1.5 million inhabitants. And where do all those tourists stay? Quick answer: in Airbnb, which used to be homes for locals. In Barcelona or Malaga, thousands of people have demonstrated to denounce that overtourism is making housing more expensive and driving residents out of their neighborhoods. And in fact, the Barcelona City Council has already announced measures such as the reduction of tourist apartments. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find a home and stay in the center of your city, but what happens? That while it is impossible for residents to afford the price of housing, all over the country there are millionaire investors buying entire villages to convert them into tourist accommodations. While housing prices rise and "turistification" expels locals from their neighborhoods, there are people like the American Jason Lee Beck, who do not speak a word of Spanish and can buy an entire village on the border with Portugal. This has led to one of the protest slogans being something as basic as "We want to live in our homes." This also happens in cities like Madrid. In the capital, 67% of Madrileños want to move to another autonomous community because the pace and price of life in the capital are unsustainable. Tourism not only makes things more expensive, but it reorders the city based on who is passing through, not on who lives there. This ultimately also causes a loss of cultural identity. Surely you have walked through a coastal area or the center of a city and instead of shops like bakeries, the neighborhood hardware store you've always known, you have seen souvenir shops, ice cream franchises, cafes, that is, everything looks the same. Identity, traditions, and also local culture are erased. And little by little, city centers are becoming a kind of no-places that are all identical. They are transit spaces where people come and go and where no deep connections with the territory are generated, roots are lost. This is also reflected in gastronomy, and this is very curious. We are no longer just talking about signs in English or German, but about gastronomic offerings that seek more to satisfy the expectations and biases of the tourist than to maintain the local essence. So, of course, taking all these things into account, the result of all this is what we are seeing on the news and in the streets: tourismphobia and massive protests in 15 European cities simultaneously. These problems are being aggravated by modern phenomena such as the viralization of destinations on social media. It is a model in which social media greatly influences where we travel, how we travel, and the activities we do in that destination. This is what you spend traveling through Egypt. Save these five places to visit in the Basque Country. If you still don't know where to go on vacation, I bring you three cheap countries in Europe. It seems trivial, but half of Instagram users use the images from this social network to make travel decisions, and the consequence is very clear. In the age of networks, destinations are no longer chosen, they go viral. We see this, for example, with the increase in tourism in places like Malaga or the Basque Country, which are becoming very popular thanks to videos on social media. The result: places unable to absorb the influx of tourists. And the fourth major problem is the environmental impact. Do you remember what we said earlier about the Maspalomas Dunes? More than half of the urban beaches in Tenerife, Lanzarote, or La Palma suffer from coastal degradation due to tourism. And speaking of beaches, another example is Maya Bay in Thailand. Does this beach sound familiar? It is one of Thailand's most famous beaches, and since the early 2000s, it has been receiving, mind you, up to 6,000 tourists a day. The consequences of this include the destruction of 50% of the coral in the bay. So the Thai authorities have had to take drastic measures. In 2018, for example, the government closed access to the beach for almost 4 years to try to save the marine ecosystem. In other places like the Seychelles or the Galapagos, the development of resorts in protected areas has resulted in mountains of garbage and invasive species that are endangering the entire ecosystem. Moreover, these all-inclusive resorts are particularly problematic because they capture most of the tourist spending and do not benefit local communities. In the end, they generate enormous amounts of food waste and deplete natural resources. Taking all this into account, the question is inevitable. Can this model continue? Some governments are already taking measures to try to change it and make it a little more sustainable. In Spain, for example, since July 2025, it is mandatory for all tourist accommodations to be registered, and if not complied with, fines can reach up to €600,000. In the Pyrenees, natural parks like Ordesa have daily visitor limits to try to control capacity and environmental impact. And in cities like San Sebastián, a cap has been placed on the number of people on guided tours and tourist tours to avoid disturbing locals. But these are reactive measures to a problem that seems to be already out of control. While residents protest in the streets, governments continue to celebrate the increase in tourist arrivals, and this is ultimately a very difficult contradiction to resolve. Deep down, we are victims of our own success. Tourism is a key pillar in our economies with a very high percentage of workers. Therefore, it is almost impossible to reassign them to other sectors. In the end, it is an engine that we cannot turn off. Dependence on tourism is also a very clear vulnerability. We saw this especially with the COVID-19 pandemic and how much economies suffered when all borders had to be closed. In conclusion, we are facing a model that is no longer sustainable. Tourism is at a historical crossroads. It can reinvent itself without collapsing, or we are simply chained to an industry that we can no longer sustain. It remains to be seen whether the tourism industry will be able to reinvent itself before it collapses. But if you want us to explore these scenarios in another video, let us know in the comments. Yeah.