Exclusive: YouGov polling across Europe suggests most countries are sympathetic to protests against overtourism
A third of people in Spain say their local area now has too many international visitors, according to a continent-wide survey that has found most people across Europe are sympathetic to protests against overtourism and back steps to combat it.
The YouGov survey comes after a summer of demonstrations and urgent warnings against the impact of mass tourism from Santorini to the Canary Islands, and measures aimed at reducing it announced from the Cinque Terre to Amsterdam.
The polling in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the UK found Spain was the country that felt most strongly about the phenomenon, with 32% of respondents saying there were now too many foreign travellers in their area.
That mentality is largely the result of overtourism though.
Spain is a country of under 50 million people which has over 70 million foreign tourists visit every year.
The US is 330 million people but only has 50ish million foreign tourists.
So imagine that the US has roughly 8x as many tourists per year (to match per capita) and imagine that a huge portion of these tourists were mostly coming from much richer countries and had the mentality of ‘let’s let loose in a cheap party spot’.
Just about everyone is in favor of some tourism, it’s just currently completely out of control in much of southern Europe. The numbers just completely dwarf just about anywhere else.