B2 · Upper Intermediate
13 min
urban lifetourismhousingculturepolitics
Welcome to Barcelona. The Locals Have Left.
Bienvenidos a Barcelona. Los vecinos se han ido.
Barcelona receives over thirty million tourists a year in a city of fewer than two million people. Fletcher and Octavio debate what happens when tourism reshapes a city so completely that the people who built it can no longer afford to stay.
Barcelona recibe más de treinta millones de turistas al año en una ciudad de menos de dos millones de habitantes. Fletcher y Octavio debaten qué ocurre cuando el turismo transforma tan profundamente una ciudad que sus propios vecinos ya no pueden permitirse vivir en ella.
7 essential B2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| desplazamiento | displacement | El desplazamiento de los vecinos por el turismo masivo es un problema grave en muchas ciudades europeas. |
| especulación inmobiliaria | real estate speculation | La especulación inmobiliaria ha subido los alquileres un cuarenta por ciento en cinco años. |
| alquiler turístico | tourist rental / short-term rental | En ese edificio, más de la mitad de los pisos son alquiler turístico. |
| arraigado | deeply rooted / entrenched | Los intereses económicos ya estaban tan arraigados que era difícil cambiar las reglas. |
| flujo turístico | tourist flow | El ayuntamiento quiere redistribuir el flujo turístico hacia zonas menos visitadas. |
| licencia | license / permit | El ayuntamiento congeló las nuevas licencias de apartamentos turísticos en 2015. |
| subjuntivo | subjunctive (mood) | Usamos el subjuntivo cuando hablamos de algo indefinido: «busco un piso que tenga terraza». |
Last time I was in Barcelona, I walked from the Ramblas down to La Barceloneta at about nine in the morning, and I tried, genuinely tried, to find a cafe where the menu wasn't printed in English first and Spanish second.
I gave up after forty minutes and ate a croissant from a chain I could have visited in Dallas.
Es que eso ya lo dice todo, Fletcher.
That says it all, Fletcher.
Barcelona recibe más de treinta y dos millones de turistas al año.
Barcelona receives more than thirty-two million tourists a year.
La ciudad tiene aproximadamente un millón seiscientos mil habitantes.
The city has approximately one million six hundred thousand inhabitants.
Si haces los cálculos, eso es casi veinte turistas por cada residente.
If you do the math, that's almost twenty tourists for every resident.
Twenty to one.
And those aren't spread evenly across the year, either.
They concentrate in summer, they concentrate in the old city, they concentrate in maybe a dozen neighborhoods.
Exacto.
Exactly.
El Barri Gòtic, La Barceloneta, El Born, Gràcia...
The Gothic Quarter, La Barceloneta, El Born, Gràcia...
barrios que tenían una vida propia, con sus mercados, sus vecinos de toda la vida, sus bares de siempre.
neighborhoods that had a life of their own, with their markets, their long-term residents, their corner bars.
Hoy muchos de esos vecinos ya no viven allí.
Today many of those residents no longer live there.
No porque no quieran, sino porque no pueden pagarlo.
Not because they don't want to, but because they can't afford it.
And that's the thing that keeps pulling me back to this story, because it's not just a story about crowds and noise and lines at the Sagrada Família.
It's a story about displacement.
Real people, real families, priced out of neighborhoods their grandparents lived in.
Y para entender por qué llegamos aquí, hay que volver a 1992.
And to understand how we got here, you have to go back to 1992.
Los Juegos Olímpicos de Barcelona fueron un momento histórico, no solo para Cataluña sino para toda España.
The Barcelona Olympics were a historic moment, not just for Catalonia but for all of Spain.
El país salía del franquismo, quería demostrarle al mundo que era moderno, cosmopolita, europeo.
The country was emerging from Francoism, it wanted to show the world it was modern, cosmopolitan, European.
I was in Spain that summer, actually.
Not Barcelona, I was further south, but the energy was extraordinary.
There was this feeling of arrival, you know, Spain had arrived somewhere.
Claro.
Exactly.
Y Barcelona hizo algo muy inteligente con los Juegos: transformó la ciudad físicamente.
And Barcelona did something very clever with the Games: it physically transformed the city.
Abrió el frente marítimo, que hasta entonces era básicamente una zona industrial abandonada.
It opened up the seafront, which until then was basically an abandoned industrial zone.
Construyó infraestructuras, reformó barrios enteros.
It built infrastructure, renovated entire neighborhoods.
Fue un urbanismo ambicioso y, en muchos aspectos, brillante.
It was ambitious urban planning and, in many respects, brilliant.
But it also, in a sense, put Barcelona on the map in a way that made it almost too attractive.
You lit the fuse in '92.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
Y luego vinieron los vuelos de bajo coste.
And then came the budget airlines.
Ryanair, EasyJet, todas esas aerolíneas que de repente pusieron Barcelona a dos horas y cincuenta euros de media Europa.
Ryanair, EasyJet, all those airlines that suddenly put Barcelona two hours and fifty euros away from half of Europe.
El modelo de ciudad turística se aceleró de una forma que nadie había previsto en 1992.
The tourist city model accelerated in a way nobody had foreseen in 1992.
Right, and then Airbnb arrives around 2008, 2009, and that changes the equation completely.
Because suddenly every apartment in the Gothic Quarter is a potential hotel room.
Y ahí es donde la situación se vuelve realmente grave.
And that's where the situation gets truly serious.
Mira, en el Barri Gòtic, en algunos bloques de pisos, más del setenta por ciento de los apartamentos se convirtieron en alquiler turístico.
Look, in the Gothic Quarter, in some apartment buildings, more than seventy percent of the flats were converted to tourist rentals.
Setenta por ciento.
Seventy percent.
¿Quién vive en esos edificios?
Who lives in those buildings?
Nadie.
Nobody.
Solo maletas con ruedas.
Just suitcases on wheels.
And the knock-on effect on rents for everyone else, not just in those buildings but across those neighborhoods, must have been enormous.
Entre 2014 y 2019, los alquileres en Barcelona subieron casi un cuarenta por ciento.
Between 2014 and 2019, rents in Barcelona rose almost forty percent.
Cuarenta por ciento en cinco años.
Forty percent in five years.
Un enfermero, un maestro, alguien que trabaja en el sector público, simplemente no puede competir con lo que paga un turista por una semana.
A nurse, a teacher, someone who works in the public sector, simply cannot compete with what a tourist pays for a week.
There's a word for this that I keep coming back to, which is the difference between a city and a stage set.
At some point Barcelona stopped being somewhere people lived and started being somewhere people performed Barcelona for visitors.
Es una imagen muy precisa.
That's a very precise image.
Y los vecinos lo han expresado de forma muy directa.
And the residents have expressed it very directly.
En 2017, en La Barceloneta, un grupo de residentes salió a la calle con pancartas.
In 2017, in La Barceloneta, a group of residents took to the streets with banners.
Una de ellas decía simplemente: "Turista, tu lujo es mi miseria." Fue una imagen que dio la vuelta al mundo.
One of them said simply: 'Tourist, your luxury is my misery.' It was an image that went around the world.
And those protesters weren't against tourists as people, were they.
They weren't xenophobes.
They were people watching their neighborhood be hollowed out and their rents go through the ceiling.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y es importante distinguir entre el turista individual, que muchas veces es una persona perfectamente normal que simplemente quiere ver una ciudad bonita, y el sistema que lo produce: la especulación inmobiliaria, las plataformas digitales, la ausencia de regulación durante años.
And it's important to distinguish between the individual tourist, who is often a perfectly normal person who simply wants to see a beautiful city, and the system that produces it: real estate speculation, digital platforms, years of absent regulation.
Although, and I want to push on this a little, there is a specific kind of tourist behavior that locals find genuinely offensive, isn't there.
Not just the economic pressure but the cultural friction.
Sí, completamente.
Yes, completely.
La Barceloneta es un barrio de pescadores, con una historia muy larga.
La Barceloneta is a fishermen's neighborhood, with a very long history.
En verano, la gente llegaba en bañador al supermercado, bebía en la calle hasta las cuatro de la mañana, dejaba basura en la playa.
In summer, people arrived at the supermarket in swimwear, drank in the street until four in the morning, left rubbish on the beach.
Los vecinos que llevan allí toda su vida sentían que su espacio cotidiano había sido ocupado.
Residents who had been there their whole lives felt that their everyday space had been occupied.
And there's a Catalan dimension to all of this that I think often gets missed when outsiders write about Barcelona.
Because this isn't just a city with an identity, it's a city with a very particular, very embattled identity.
Eso es fundamental, Fletcher.
That's fundamental, Fletcher.
Para muchos barceloneses, especialmente los catalanistas, el turismo masivo no es solo un problema económico.
For many Barcelonans, especially those with Catalanist sympathies, mass tourism is not just an economic problem.
Es también una amenaza cultural.
It's also a cultural threat.
Cuando un barrio pierde sus tiendas de toda la vida, sus bares, sus asociaciones de vecinos, pierde también su lengua, sus costumbres, su carácter propio.
When a neighborhood loses its longstanding shops, its bars, its residents' associations, it also loses its language, its customs, its own character.
The language point is real.
I noticed on my last visit that in the most touristed areas you can spend an entire day without hearing a word of Catalan.
In a Catalan city.
Y eso duele, porque el catalán es una lengua que sobrevivió cuarenta años de dictadura franquista, que estaba prohibida en la escuela y en los medios públicos.
And that hurts, because Catalan is a language that survived forty years of Francoist dictatorship, that was banned in schools and public media.
La gente la protegió en casa, en la familia, en la cultura popular.
People protected it at home, in the family, in popular culture.
Y ahora no la elimina un dictador sino el mercado turístico.
And now it's not being eliminated by a dictator but by the tourist market.
That's a striking way to frame it.
Franco couldn't kill the language.
Airbnb might.
Bueno, es una exageración, pero entiendes la idea.
Well, it's an exaggeration, but you get the idea.
Ahora, hay que ser honesto: Barcelona también necesita el turismo.
Now, to be fair: Barcelona also needs tourism.
El sector turístico representa alrededor del quince por ciento del PIB de la ciudad.
The tourist sector represents around fifteen percent of the city's GDP.
Da trabajo a miles de personas.
It employs thousands of people.
No puedes simplemente cerrarlo como si fuera un grifo.
You can't simply turn it off like a tap.
Which is why the political debate is so genuinely hard.
Ada Colau won the mayoralty in 2015 partly on an anti-speculation platform.
She came in promising to freeze tourist apartment licenses.
How did that go?
Con resultados muy desiguales, hay que decirlo.
With very mixed results, it has to be said.
Congeló las nuevas licencias de apartamentos turísticos en 2015, sí.
She froze new tourist apartment licenses in 2015, yes.
Pero la industria ya tenía nueve mil pisos registrados, y muchos más operaban de forma ilegal.
But the industry already had nine thousand registered flats, and many more operating illegally.
Las multas existían pero eran difíciles de aplicar.
Fines existed but were hard to enforce.
Las plataformas digitales no colaboraban fácilmente con las autoridades.
Digital platforms didn't cooperate easily with the authorities.
There's a pattern here that I saw in cities all over the world when I was reporting.
The regulation arrives after the damage is already done, and by then the economic interests are so entrenched that enforcement becomes a political fight.
Completamente.
Completely.
Y además hay una tensión interesante dentro de la propia política barcelonesa.
And there's also an interesting tension within Barcelona's own politics.
Los partidos más conservadores, que representan al sector hotelero y empresarial, decían que Colau estaba espantando a los inversores.
The more conservative parties, representing the hotel and business sector, said Colau was scaring off investors.
Los movimientos de vecinos decían que no hacía lo suficiente.
The residents' movements said she wasn't doing enough.
Ella estaba en el medio, recibiendo golpes de todos lados.
She was in the middle, taking fire from all sides.
Classic position for anyone trying to manage a genuinely structural problem with municipal-level tools.
Claro.
Right.
Y hay medidas más recientes que son interesantes.
And there are more recent measures that are interesting.
El ayuntamiento ha anunciado que no renovará las licencias de apartamentos turísticos cuando venzan en 2028.
The city council has announced it will not renew tourist apartment licenses when they expire in 2028.
Eso afectaría a más de diez mil pisos.
That would affect more than ten thousand flats.
Es una decisión muy valiente o muy imprudente, dependiendo de a quién le preguntes.
It's either a very brave or a very reckless decision, depending on who you ask.
Ten thousand apartments back on the residential market.
If it actually happens, if it survives the legal challenges, that would be remarkable.
Has any major European city done anything on that scale?
No exactamente a esa escala.
Not exactly at that scale.
Amsterdam ha limitado el número de noches que se puede alquilar una propiedad.
Amsterdam has capped the number of nights a property can be rented.
París tiene restricciones en el centro histórico.
Paris has restrictions in the historic center.
Pero lo de Barcelona sería más radical.
But what Barcelona is doing would be more radical.
Y ya hay demandas judiciales de propietarios que dicen que es una violación de sus derechos de propiedad.
And there are already lawsuits from owners saying it's a violation of their property rights.
And there's the other side of this debate that I want to make sure we don't skip over, which is: what about the tourists themselves?
What about cities in other parts of Catalonia or Spain that would genuinely benefit from more visitors and more money?
Es un punto muy válido.
That's a very valid point.
El problema no es el turismo en sí, es su concentración.
The problem isn't tourism itself, it's its concentration.
Hay gente que habla de redistribuir el flujo turístico, de crear incentivos para visitar lugares menos conocidos de Cataluña.
There are people talking about redistributing tourist flows, about creating incentives to visit lesser-known parts of Catalonia.
Pero es difícil porque los turistas quieren ver la Sagrada Família, quieren ver el Barri Gòtic.
But it's difficult because tourists want to see the Sagrada Família, they want to see the Gothic Quarter.
No vienen a ver una bonita ciudad medieval en el interior de Tarragona.
They don't come to see a beautiful medieval town in the interior of Tarragona.
Which brings you back to a question that probably has no clean answer: can you love a city to death?
Can a place be destroyed by the very thing that makes it attractive?
Sí, y creo que Barcelona ya está viviendo una versión de esa respuesta.
Yes, and I think Barcelona is already living one version of that answer.
Lo que hace que Barcelona sea especial, su mezcla de arquitectura modernista, de barrios con carácter, de cultura mediterránea, de lengua propia, depende de que haya gente que la viva.
What makes Barcelona special, its mix of modernist architecture, characterful neighborhoods, Mediterranean culture, its own language, depends on people actually living it.
Una ciudad sin vecinos es solo un museo.
A city without residents is just a museum.
A museum that charges seven euros for a coffee.
Actually, wait, I want to come back to something you said a little while ago, because you used a construction that I want to ask you about.
You said "dependiendo de a quién le preguntes." My instinct would be to say "dependiendo de a quién preguntas," and I want to know why yours is right and mine is probably wrong.
Buena observación.
Good observation.
El subjuntivo, Fletcher.
The subjunctive, Fletcher.
Cuando la situación es hipotética o indefinida, como "quienquiera que sea esa persona", usas el subjuntivo.
When the situation is hypothetical or indefinite, like 'whoever that person might be,' you use the subjunctive.
"A quién le preguntes" significa que no sabemos quién es esa persona.
'A quién le preguntes' means we don't know who that person is.
Si dijeras "a quién le preguntas", suena como si ya supieras a quién vas a preguntar.
If you said 'a quién le preguntas,' it sounds like you already know who you're going to ask.
So the subjunctive is doing the work of signaling the indefiniteness.
The unknown person.
It's not just about doubt or emotion the way it's often explained in textbooks, it's about whether the thing or person is defined or not.
Exacto.
Exactly.
"Busco un apartamento que tenga terraza": no sé cuál es, es indefinido, subjuntivo.
'I'm looking for an apartment that has a terrace': I don't know which one, it's indefinite, subjunctive.
"Busco el apartamento que tiene terraza": ya sé cuál es, es específico, indicativo.
'I'm looking for the apartment that has a terrace': I already know which one, it's specific, indicative.
Es una diferencia pequeña en la forma pero muy importante en el significado.
It's a small difference in form but very important in meaning.
Definite versus indefinite.
English does this with "a" and "the" and mostly leaves it there.
Spanish builds it right into the verb.
And if I'd used the indicative back there in context, it would have sounded odd but probably not incomprehensible.
Comprensible, sí, pero sonarías como un turista.
Understandable, yes, but you'd sound like a tourist.
Y dado el tema de hoy, quizás es mejor evitar eso.
And given today's topic, perhaps it's better to avoid that.
Aunque, oye, al menos no dirías que estás muy embarazado.
Although, hey, at least you wouldn't say you're very pregnant.