How the Iberian holiday hotspot of Lisbon is handling overtourism

Fuelled by the rise of tourism in Portugal, the narrow streets of the country’s capital, Lisbon, have become clogged with tuk-tuks. From her balcony, Rosa Alves says she does not even try to count them anymore. They appear as soon as the sun rises, carrying tourists to the top of the hill.

The 78-year-old pensioner has been living in her apartment for the past 50 years, but she says things have never been so bad in her beloved neighbourhood. There are more tourists, more tuk-tuks and more traffic, she says.

According to Rosa and reports in Portuguese media, sometimes residents can’t even leave their homes whenever they want due to traffic and parked tuk-tuks blocking their way. “For the last five, six years this has become a mess. All over Graça (neighbourhood), there has been a serious change for the worse” she says.

On the other side of the road, a graffiti says: “Stop Gentrification”.

Alves didn’t write it, but she sympathises with the message.

In addition to the traffic the area has changed: her neighbours started to leave and strangers became the most common next-door presence as holiday rentals took over.

The tuk-tuks are just one issue of the tourism influx into the city of Lisbon. But it’s not just here, it’s a world trend.

“Traffic jam in paradise”

2024 is expected to be the first year in which global tourism will set records since the coronavirus pandemic brought much of life on earth to a halt.

Travel is surging, rather than levelling off, driven by lingering “revenge travel” (taking a trip to make up for lost time during the pandemic), digital nomad campaigns and so-called golden visas blamed in part for skyrocketing housing prices.

The World Travel and Tourism Council predicted in April that Portugal’s tourism sector will grow this year by 24 per cent over 2019 levels, creating 126,000 more jobs since then and accounting for about 20 per cent of the national economy.

Rising property prices already were pushing an increasing number of people out of the housing market, driven upward in part by a growing influx of foreign investors and tourists seeking short-term rentals.

For the past months there have been reports of several incidents against tourists in other European travel hotspots. Some “anti-tourism” protests have intended to shame visitors as they dine — or, as in Barcelona in July, douse them with water pistols.

In Sintra, local activists decided to start a movement with messages such as “traffic jam in paradise” or “Sintra is not Disneyland”, some written in Portuguese, others in English.

But for another local, it is not about scaring away the tourists but rather about bringing them into the fight. She stressed that she wanted the visitors “to become our allies” and to understand that there is an issue here”, she said.

Anti-tourism demonstrations are an example of locals using the power of their numbers and social media to issue leaders with an ultimatum: manage this issue better or we’ll scare away the tourists, who could spend their their money elsewhere.

House prices, traffic and water management are on all of the checklists.

What is ‘overtourism’?

The phrase itself generally describes the tipping point at which visitors and their cash stop benefitting residents and instead cause harm by degrading historic sites, overwhelming infrastructure and making life markedly more difficult for those who live there.

It’s a hashtag that gives a name to the protests and hostility emerging in some destinations.

But look a little deeper and you’ll find knottier issues for locals and their leaders, none more universal than housing prices driven up by short-term rentals like Airbnb, from Spain to South Africa.

Some locals are encouraging “quality tourism,” generally defined as more consideration by visitors toward residents and less drunken behaviour, disruptive selfie-taking and other questionable choices.

In January, the United Nations’ tourism agency predicted that worldwide tourism would exceed the records set in 2019 by 2 per cent.

By the end of March, more than 285 million tourists had travelled internationally, about 20 per cent more than the first quarter of 2023. Europe remained the most-visited destination, the agency reported.