Amid protests against mass tourism and measures taken over the past few years against overtourism, the tourism board of the city of Barcelona is rebranding from “Visit Barcelona” to “This is Barcelona”.
The new campaign will be launching on 22 August, on the occasion of the America’s Cup, a sailing competition bound to bring the latest state-of-the-art vessels to the city’s coast. The “radical change from the slogan that Turisme de Barcelona has been using for 15 years”, as the board’s general director, Mateu Hernández, will be first shown on the Cup’s broadcasts which are estimated to have 1.5 million viewers.
The context has changed and the “visit” has reached its ceiling and it was time to change it.
Mateu Hernández, General Director Turisme de Barcelona
“Visit Barcelona has been a success story that has responded perfectly to the challenge that the city and Turisme de Barcelona had set themselves at the time: to go from being an industrial city in crisis to a city where tourism was the driving force of change, which has happened”, Hernández explained. “But today, Turisme de Barcelona no longer calls for people to visit us in general. Today, Turisme de Barcelona makes an affirmation of the importance of our identity as a city and that is why we have gone from Visit to This is Barcelona.”
The move is part of the board’s strategy of targeting more valuable visitors, switching from quantity to quality and responsible tourists, who spend more time and more money and take the time to discover a destination sustainably rather than just disembark a cruise for half a day, one of the audiences the city has in particular moved away from.
The campaign, which has been allocated a €5.5 million budget, aims to highlight specific aspects of the city rather than its mere existence as a tourism destination, including its culture, art, music, gastronomy, sports, architecture, fairs, urban planning and public space. It is the clear embodiment of a new and pioneering way of doing promotion”, Hernández said.
The change in tone could be welcomed by city residents, who, at the beginning of July, sprayed visitors with water guns at in a protest against mass tourism. Barcelona has been struggling to moderate tourist footfall for years. Measures were taken to tackle large groups of tourists in 2022, while a busy bus route has been hidden from google maps to ensure residents, especially the elderly, can find a place. In the latest move, mayor Jaume Collboni has promised short term rentals will disappear from the city by 2028. The 10,101 apartments currently approved as tourist lets should have their licences scrapped in the next 4 year.
Other Spanish destinations are also confronted with the downsides of mass tourism. In April, residents of the Canary Islands staged a hunger strike, citing the environmental disaster, left behind by tourists, with golf courses, swimming pools and other developments sucking up huge amounts of water in an era when water shortages are becoming more frequent.
A residential coastal town in Menorca, owned by just 195 people, gets 800,000 tourists a year, mostly concentrated in the high season months between May and October. The visiting hours introduced last year have had little effect, so now the community is working on getting approval to entirely ban visitors. Soon after in May, anti-tourism protests were staged throughout the Balearic Islands, with hundreds of people taking to the streets of Menorca, 1,000 in Ibiza and 10,000 in Palma de Mallorca, with another 20,000 people taking to the streets of Mallorca on 21 July.
