Part 1: Too Many Tourists? The Rising Rebellion Against Over-Tourism in 2025

Is tourism saving destinations or suffocating them? 

On June 15, 2025, around 600 masked protestors marched through the streets of Barcelona, armed not with Molotovs but water pistols, smoke bombs, and protest stickers, under slogans like “Your holidays, my misery” and “Mass tourism kills the city.” They doused passers-by and plastered tourist businesses to dramatise how 26 million annual visitors overwhelm a city of just 1.6 million residents.

Meanwhile, in Venice, authorities expanded the controversial €5 day-tripper entry fee in April–July 2025, doubling it to €10 for last-minute visitors. The cost was applied on 54 peak days and enforced via QR codes at train stations and bus depots.

The effort reflects deep anxiety; the city’s tourist bed capacity now matches or exceeds its dwindling resident population (about 48,000), and up to 75,000 daily visitors crowd its narrow alleys.

Global Reckoning in 2025

These are not isolated incidents but signs of a mounting backlash across multiple continents.

In Southern Europe, coordinated protests erupted in Barcelona(Spain), Ibiza, Palma, Malaga, Granada, Lisbon, Naples, Venice, and San Sebastián, symbolising a larger challenge to mass tourism. Leaders and tourism watchdogs are now enforcing short-term rental bans, visitor caps, entrance fees and tourist taxes from Barcelona’s rental restrictions to Santorini’s cruise-ship limits, Athens’s Acropolis booking quotas and Bali's halted new hotel construction. 2025 has become the watershed year where overtourism met its match.

Understanding Overtourism

At its core, over-tourism or mass tourism is what happens when the number of visitors to a destination exceeds its capacity to handle them socially, environmentally, or economically. The term may sound abstract, but the reality is far from it. In cities like Barcelona, Venice, or Bali, overtourism is not just about long queues or crowded streets; it’s about residents priced out of their neighbourhoods, ancient sites strained by footfall, and daily life eroded by the constant churn of short-term visitors.

Barcelona offers a vivid case study. The city of just 1.6 million residents welcomed over 26 million tourists in 2024, with more than 15.6 million staying overnight, according to local tourism authorities. That’s over 10 times the local population, and these numbers don't even count the cruise ship day-trippers, which add another 1.6 million visitors a year. The strain is visible and visceral.

Indeed, short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com have drastically reshaped urban housing. Many locals argue that these platforms have hollowed out communities, turning homes into revolving doors for temporary guests. In 2025, Barcelona's city council announced a sweeping ban on all short-term tourist apartment licenses by 2028, a radical move that underscores the urgency of the problem.

The causes of overtourism are complex but not mysterious. The explosion of low-cost airlines over the past two decades made long weekends in Rome or Prague as accessible as train rides to nearby towns. Cruise ships, offering buffet-style itineraries at cut-rate prices, funnel thousands of passengers into delicate port cities like Dubrovnik or Venice, often for just a few hours, but with disproportionate environmental impact. And now, social media has taken the reins, catapulting once-undiscovered gems into viral hotspots. A single TikTok(not in India) or Instagram post can turn a quiet viewpoint like Barcelona's Bunkers del Carmel into a morning stampede of selfie-seekers.

Compounding all of this is what we call “revenge travel”, the surge in global tourism following years of pandemic-era restrictions. According to the European Travel Commission, travel spending in Europe is projected to reach $838 billion in 2025, an 11% rise compared to the previous year. While economically welcome, this spike has renewed pressure on places already gasping for breath. "We love tourists, but we can’t live in a theme park," said Carlos Antúnez, a city planner in Palma de Mallorca.

Overtourism, then, is not just about crowded monuments or longer queues. It's about the cultural and infrastructural limits of a place and what happens when those limits are ignored. The question now isn’t whether people should travel, but how they can travel more consciously, more sustainably, and more respectfully.

The question is, “Is tourism still a blessing or has the pendulum swung the other way?”
“Does the flood of global travellers now turbocharged by cheap flights and post-COVID pent-up demand sustain local economies, or is it choking community life, inflating rents, straining infrastructure, and eroding culture?"