Part 1: Too Many Tourists? The Rising Rebellion Against Overtourism in 2025

Is tourism saving destinations or suffocating them? 

Protest Flashpoints of When Locals Push Back

In Barcelona, 600 masked protestors took to the streets on June 15, 2025, equipped with water pistols, smoke bombs, and protest banners emblazoned with slogans like “Your holidays, my misery” and “Mass tourism kills the city”. One demonstrator encapsulated the sentiment, “I can’t afford to live in my own city,” a 40‑year‑old local expressed to a reliable source.
In response, Barcelona’s government announced a ban on all short‑term rental licenses by 2028, curbs on cruise docks and increased tourist taxes.
Over in Venice, the city continues its struggle to reclaim its streets and canals by imposing a €5 fee on day‑trippers, with €10 levied for bookings made within four days, active on 54 peak days annually. This measure is matched with caps on cruise ship access and limits on guided tour group sizes.
Meanwhile, smaller Mediterranean cities like Palma de Mallorca and San Sebastián have seen similar unrest, with demonstrators urging tourists to stay away and new municipal directives targeting short-term rentals and bus zoning rules.

Environmental Fallout in Asia

On Bali, the once-idyllic island saw nearly 15 million visitors in 2024, sparking heavy backlash. Locals and grassroots activists are protesting the disappearance of sacred paddy fields, illegal construction of resorts, and untreated plastic pollution on beaches. The government has responded with a $10 visitor levy, expanded eco-tourism initiatives, and bans on single-use plastics and tourist motorbike rentals.
On Koh Samui, Thailand, environmental harm and water shortages have alarmed residents. Tourists complain of plastic-strewn beaches, degraded sea clarity, and prices nearly doubling in 2024, partly fueled by media exposure (e.g., The White Lotus).
In Kyoto, viral footage of runaway crowds in the Sannenzaka district triggered a national conversation about mass tourism. The city is piloting timed entry and encouraging off-peak visits, while issuing fines up to ¥10,000 (~$65) for disruptive behaviour and implementing etiquette campaigns.

Global Measures from Cruise Caps to Rental Bans

Machu Picchu, Peru’s crown jewel, saw 1.5 million visitors last year, far exceeding UNESCO's ideal limit of ~2,500/day. Peru now enforces strict daily quotas and mandates licensed guide accompaniment to preserve the site’s integrity.
Amsterdam, with over 20 million visitors in 2023, has reacted strongly: banning cruise ships from the inner city, halting new hotel approvals in core zones, and cutting river cruise traffic by 271,000 visits annually.
In Dubrovnik, a stop on high‑season cruise itineraries, locals now face capped cruise docks and bag-screening slots in the Old Town. The “Respect the City” initiative encourages quieter tourism, telling cruise passengers, “Don’t be just a backdrop for selfies.”
Finally, Santorini, the jewel of the Cyclades, attracted over 2 million visitors in 2024. Residents have staged protests to “send cruise ships home”, while the Greek government has introduced €20-per-cruise-passenger fees, cruise docking limits, and sustainable tourism plans.

Policy Moves vs Protest Energy vs Environmental Toll

Across the globe, the response to overtourism has manifested in three primary forms- public protests, government policy interventions, and environmental fallouts. In hotspots like Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, and Kyoto, local anger has boiled over into street demonstrations, viral videos, and grassroots resistance campaigns. In parallel, government and municipal authorities have introduced hard-hitting policies from visitor caps and rental bans in Amsterdam and Florence to cruise docking fees in Santorini and Kyoto’s crowd-control fines.

Meanwhile, destinations like Bali and Koh Samui are bearing the ecological cost: disappearing agricultural land, polluted beaches, and water shortages. These consequences are forcing policymakers to adopt urgent environmental regulations, such as Bali’s ban on single-use plastics and efforts in Japan to use tech-driven crowd management systems.

Each approach reflects the multidimensional stress tourism exerts on housing, culture, ecology, and quality of life, demanding systemic solutions beyond slogans and short-term fixes.

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?"

Read Part 2: Overtourism: How Can Our Favourite Destinations Survive the Crowds?