巴塞罗那：旅游经济的受害者？

    去年8月，巴塞罗那摄影师温塞斯•福纳的一张照片登上了全球的各大报纸。照片中，一群年轻的意大利游客在巴塞罗那滨海街区闲荡。当时正值下午，这些游客看上去非常高兴。

    但特别之处在于，这些人全身一丝不挂。

    对巴塞罗那的工薪阶层而言，这些赤身裸体的意大利人成了“压倒骆驼的最后一根稻草”。在接下来的数晚，几千名市民走上空气湿润的夏日街头，唱着圣歌，敲盆打碗地抗议游客数量超过负荷。他们的条幅上写着：“本社区恕不出售。”

    与巴黎、布拉格、威尼斯等许多欧洲城市一样，巴塞罗那曾经大力发展旅游业。借1992年奥运会之机，这座城市清洁了海滩，修起了游艇码头，扩建了机场，恢复了之前疏于管理的巴塞罗那老城区，以吸引游客。

    游客的确蜂拥而来：根据政府公布的数据，从1990年到2013年，在巴塞罗那过夜的游客数量从每年170万人增长至每年760万人，宾馆客房的数量从1.0265万间增长至3.7069万间。如今，旅游业占巴塞罗那经济总量的14%。

    但今天许多当地人想问，旅游业的发展是否有个上限？

    在这座拥有160万居民的拥挤城市，旅游业带来的冲击不容忽视。如今，在巴塞罗那市中心老城区的主干道兰布拉大街上，79%不是本地人，58%是外国游客。每当夜幕降临时，一群群来自欧洲各地的单身男女穿越市中心老城区，他们常常在大街上呕吐和招妓。

    旅游业不止影响到市中心老城区。著名加泰罗尼亚建筑师安东尼•高迪设计的不朽作品，尤其是被联合国教科文组织列为世界遗产的古埃尔公园和神圣家族大教堂的周边地区，已经被旅游团和大巴车弄得几乎和居民区无法区分了。

    在游客最多的区域，居民失去了住所，因为房东把它们变成了短租房屋。那些继续住下去的人也很难找到卖日用品的商店，那里的商店只卖便宜的啤酒、纪念品和巴塞罗那球星莱昂内尔•梅西的10号球衣。

    由于游客大军的来临和本地身份感的缺失，鲁姆•文图拉•吉尔等人不禁抱怨他们的社区已经成为“主题公园”。她曾经在巴塞罗那住了很长时间，最近却由于游客过多离开了那里。

    她表示：“巴塞罗那的精髓正在消逝。”

    巴塞罗那的情况并非孤例，欧洲城市的抗争甚至催生了一系列悲叹大众旅游的纪录片。委内瑞拉制片人爱德华多•奇瓦斯拍摄的《再见巴塞罗那》，在YouTube上点击数超过30万次，此外还有以柏林为主题的《欢迎，再见》，以及《威尼斯综合征》。（这些影片的共同点是什么？一堆滚轮箱包在鹅卵石上拖行发出的那种令人恼火的声音。）

    巴塞罗那酒店经理霍尔迪•克洛斯表示，这座城市应该把过夜的旅客数量限定在每年1000万人次，从而跻身欧洲一流城市的行列。不过当地人发出了质疑：大众旅游是否已经让巴塞罗那的部分地区变得不适合居住了。许多巴塞罗那人已经逃离：从2006年到2013年，1.46万人离开了市中心老城区，占总人口的12.3%。

    由于市民的抗议，市政府和区政府终于决定采取行动。去年，他们暂时停止了给短租公寓颁发新牌照，并且对Airbnb处以3万英镑的罚金，因为该网站非法向游客出租客房。

    在巴塞罗那游行之后，政府在街区增派了警力和巡视员，逮捕那些向游客出租房间、但并未获得政府许可的业主，并迅速关闭了170个短租公寓。

    今年2月底，约250名当地人参加了一场公开听证会（还有更多人在门外等候），追问巴塞罗那副市长关于应对旅游问题的计划。

    但解决问题的进展相当缓慢，当地政府是否有政治决心来控制巴塞罗那的重要产业之一也存有疑问。

    英国伦敦大学学院城市规划研究员克莱尔•克罗姆表示：“政府青睐规模庞大的旅游产业，尤其是宾馆。这关系到巨大的经济利益，所以很难进行管制。”

    旅游业在经济和其他方面促进了巴塞罗那等城市的发展。但具有讽刺意味的是，大众旅游首先摧毁的是那些吸引游客的城市魅力。政府的管制是否会来得太晚，以至于无法将巴塞罗那从旅游业的成功中“拯救”出来，目前尚不明朗。

    制片人奇瓦斯表示：“旅游业是不可阻挡的。关键在于你如何管理它，唯有管理得当，巴塞罗那才不会变成下一个威尼斯。”（财富中文网）

    译者：严匡正

    审校：任文科

    Last August, Barcelona photographer VicensForner snapped a picture that showed up in newspapers around the globe: In it, a group of young Italian tourists are cavorting through the streets of his seafront neighborhood, Barceloneta. It is mid-afternoon, and the guys are the very image of happy travelers.

    They are also buck-naked.

    For many in working class Barceloneta, the Italian flesh was the last straw. Over the next few evenings, several thousand locals poured onto the humid summer streets to chant and bang pots in protest of tourism overload. Their banners read, “The neighborhood is not for sale.”

    Like many European cities, from Paris to Prague to Venice, Barcelona has bet hard on tourism. The city began to woo tourists with the 1992 Olympics, when it cleaned its beaches, built cruise ship docks, expanded its airport, and rehabilitated its neglected Old City, the Ciutat Vella.

    And the tourists complied: according to government figures, between 1990 and 2013 the number of annual visitors who stayed overnight exploded from 1.7 million to 7.6 million, and the number of hotel rooms grew from 10,265 to 37,069. Today, tourism account for about 14% of the Barcelona’s economy.

    But now many locals are asking, how much tourism is too much?

    In this compact city of 1.6 million residents, the tourist impact is impossible to miss. Today, 79% of the people on La Rambla, the main avenue in the Ciutat Vella, are not from Barcelona; 58% are foreign tourists. Packs of bachelor and bachelorette parties from around Europe stumble through the Ciutat Vella at night, regularly vomiting in the streets and hiring prostitutes.

    And the effects are not limited to the Ciutat Vella. Tourists groups and buses have made the areas around monuments designed by famed Catalan architect AntoniGaudí – most notably Park Güell and the SagradaFamilia, both UNESCO World Heritage sites – virtually unrecognizable as residential neighborhoods.

    In the most touristic barrios, residents are losing their apartments as landlords convert them into short stay rentals, and it is difficult for those who remain to find stores selling anything but cheap beer, souvenirs, and the No. 10 jersey of Barcelona soccer star Lionel Messi.

    It is this loss of local identity, as much as the tourist hordes, that make people like Llum Ventura Gil, a longtime Barceloneta resident who recently left the barrio because of tourism overload, complain that their neighborhoods have been turned into “theme parks.”

    “Barcelona is losing its essence,” she says.

    Barcelona is not alone, and the struggle of European cities has even spawned a subgenre of documentaries bemoaning mass tourism. Barcelona has Bye Bye Barcelona, a film by Venezuelan filmmaker Eduardo Chibás that has received over 300,000 YouTube views; Berlin has Welcome and Goodbye; and Venice has The Venice Syndrome. (One common feature of the genre? The irritating sound of squads of roller bags clicking over cobblestones.)

    The head of Barcelona’s hotel chamber, Jordi Clos, says the city should aim to get to 10 million overnight tourists a year to put it in the “first division” of European cities. But locals question whether mass tourism has already made parts of the city unlivable. Many Barcelonans have fled: between 2006 and 2013, 14,600 people – 12.3% of the population – left Ciutat Vella.

    Pushed by citizen protests, the city and regional government has finally begun to take action. Last year it put a moratorium on new licenses for short-stay apartments and fined Airbnb €30,000 for hawking illegal tourist rentals.

    After the Barceloneta outburst, it sent more police and inspectors into the neighborhood and began to bust landlords who rent out unlicensed tourist units, quickly closing 170 short-term apartments.

    And in late February, some 250 locals packed a public audience (while many more waited outside) to grill one of Barcelona’s deputy mayors on the city’s plans for handling tourism.

    But the going is slow and some question whether the local government has the political will to regulate one of Barcelona’s prime industries.

    “The government very much favors the big tourism industry, particularly hotels,” says Claire Colomb, an urban planning researcher at University College London. “There are huge economic interests at stake that make regulation very difficult.”

    Tourism has enriched cities like Barcelona in financial and other ways. The irony of mass tourism, however, is that it destroys the enchantment that attracted tourists in the first place. It’s unclear if efforts to regulate it will come too late to “save” Barcelona from its success.

    “Tourism is unstoppable,” says the filmmaker Chibás. “It’s how you manage it so it doesn’t become another Venice.”