The doorbell to Martinho de Almada Pimentel’s house in Sintra, Portugal, is hard to find, and that’s fine with him. It’s a long rope that, when pulled, rings a bell on the roof, letting him know that someone is outside the hillside villa that his great-grandfather had built in 1914 as a monument to privacy.
The doorbell to Martinho de Almada Pimentel’s house in Sintra, Portugal, is hard to find, and that’s fine with him. It’s a long rope that, when pulled, rings a bell on the roof, letting him know that someone is outside the hillside villa that his great-grandfather had built in 1914 as a monument to privacy.
Pimentel has seen very little of that in this summer of overtourism. More than three million people visit the mountains and castles of Sintra every year, which has long been one of Portugal’s most prosperous regions due to its cool microclimate and landscape.
Travelers stuck in traffic outside the sunlit walls of the Casa do Cipreste sometimes spot the bell and pull the cord, “because it’s weird,” he says. With the windows open, he can smell the car exhaust and hear the “tuk-tuk” of the oversized scooters named for their sound. And he can feel the frustration of the 5,000 visitors a day who have to queue around the house on the single-lane switchbacks leading to Pena Palace, the former home of King Ferdinand II.
“Now I’m more isolated than I was during COVID,” the soft-spoken Pimentel, who lives alone, said in a porch interview this month. “Now I try not to go out. What I feel is: angry.”
This is a story about what it means to visit in 2024, the first year in which global tourism is expected to break records since the coronavirus pandemic brought much of life on Earth to a standstill. Travel is increasing rather than leveling off, fueled by ongoing revenge trips, digital nomad campaigns and so-called golden visas that are partly blamed for skyrocketing property prices.
Anyone who has been listening carefully during this summer of “overtourism” knows the increasing consequences worldwide: traffic jams in paradise. Reports of hospitality workers living in tents.
Venice in Italy was the first city in the world to Day tourists must pay a fee only to visit the historic canals and other attractions on peak days. The measure is intended to counter overtourism and mitigate the damaging effects that large crowds can have on some of the city’s fragile sites, while also encouraging some tourists to visit the city at less busy times of the year.
Elsewhere, “anti-tourism” protests aim to shame visitors while they eat – or, as in Barcelona in July, spray them with water pistols.
The demonstrations are an example of how locals are using their power and social media to give travel destination officials an ultimatum: “Do a better job of dealing with this problem, or we’ll drive away tourists – who could spend their $11.1 trillion a year elsewhere.” Real estate prices, traffic and water management are on all checklists.
You might grumble that the violins have now voted for people like Pimentel, who are wealthy enough to live in places worth visiting. But this is more than just a rich people problem.
“Not being able to get an ambulance or my groceries, is that a rich person’s problem?” says Matthew Bedell, another resident of Sintra, where there is neither a pharmacy nor a grocery store in the center of the UNESCO-protected district. “To me, these are not rich people’s problems.”
The term itself generally describes the tipping point at which visitors and their money no longer benefit local residents, but instead cause harm by destroying historic sites, overloading infrastructure, and making life significantly more difficult for the people living there.
It’s a hashtag that gives a name to the protests and hostility you’ve seen all summer. But look a little closer and you’ll find that locals and their leaders have even more complicated problems. None of them more widespread than property prices driven up by short-term rentals like Airbnb, from Spain to South Africa. Some places are promoting “quality tourism,” generally defined as visitors being more considerate of locals and less drunken behavior, disruptive selfies and other questionable choices.
“Overtourism is probably also a social phenomenon,” says an analysis for the World Trade Organization written by Joseph Martin Cheer of Western Sydney University and Marina Novelli of the University of Nottingham. In China and India, for example, overcrowded places are more socially acceptable. “This suggests that cultural expectations of personal space and expectations of exclusivity are different.”
The summer of 2023 was marked by travel chaos itself—airports and airlines were overwhelmed, passports a nightmare for travelers from the U.S. But as the year came to a close, there were numerous signs that the onslaught of COVID-19 revenge travel was increasing.
In January, the United Nations tourism agency forecast that global tourism would surpass 2019 records by 2%. By the end of March, the agency reported, more than 285 million tourists had traveled internationally, about 20% more than in the first quarter of 2023. Europe remained the most visited destination. The World Travel & Tourism Council forecast in April that 142 of the 185 countries it analyzed would set tourism records, generating $11.1 trillion and creating 330 million jobs worldwide.
But it’s not just money, there’s also been trouble in paradise this year: Spain has played a major role in everything from water management problems to exploding property prices to dramas among drunken tourists.
Protests broke out across the country back in March, when graffiti in Malaga allegedly told tourists to “go home.” In Spain’s Canary Islands, thousands demonstrated against visitors and construction work that overwhelmed water supplies and drove up property prices. In Barcelona, protesters verbally abused people they claimed to be visitors and threw water at them while they dined outdoors on the tourist-frequented Ramblas.
In Japan, where tourist numbers boosted by the weak yen are expected to hit a new record in 2024, Kyoto has banned tourists from certain alleyways. The government has imposed restrictions on climbing Mount Fuji. And in Fujikawaguchiko, a town that offers some of the best views of the mountain’s perfect cone, authorities have erected a large black privacy screen in a parking lot to discourage tourists from crowding the place. Tourists apparently fought back by cutting holes in the privacy screen at eye level.
Air traffic has become increasingly worse, the US government reported in July. UNESCO warned of potential damage to protected areas. And Fodor’s “No List 2024” called on people to reconsider visiting hotspots of distress, including places in Greece and Vietnam and areas with water problems in California, India and Thailand.
Not-yet-trendy places wanted to benefit from de-touristing campaigns, such as Amsterdam’s “Stay Away” campaign aimed at partying young men. The “Welcome to MonGOlia” campaign, for example, lured people away from the land of Genghis Khan. Visits by foreign tourists to this country increased by 25% in the first seven months of 2024 compared to the previous year.
In fact, tourism is booming and changing so quickly that some experts consider the term “overtourism” to be outdated.
Michael O’Regan, a senior lecturer in tourism and events at Glasgow Caledonian University, argues that “overtourism” has become a buzzword that fails to reflect the fact that the experience depends largely on the success or failure of crowd control. It is true that many of the demonstrations are not against the tourists themselves, but against the politicians who allow the locals who should be benefitting to be the ones paying.
“There has been a backlash against the business models on which modern tourism is built and against the lack of response from politicians,” he said in an interview. Tourism “recovered faster than expected,” he acknowledged, but tourists are not the problem. “There is a global battle for tourists. We cannot ignore that. … So what happens if we get too many tourists? Destinations need to do more research.”
Virpi Makela can describe exactly what is happening in her corner of Sintra.
Guests arriving at Casa do Valle, their guesthouse on a hill near the village centre, call Makela in desperation, unsure how to find their property amid Sintra’s ‘disorganised’ traffic rules, which seem to change without notice.
“There’s a pillar in the middle of the road that goes up and down, and you can’t get through because you’re ruining your car. So you have to get down somehow, but you can’t turn around, so you have to drive down the road backwards,” says Makela, who has lived in Portugal for 36 years. “And then people get so frustrated that they come onto our road, which also has a sign saying ‘Authorized vehicles only.’ And they block everything.”
No one disputes that Portugal’s tourism boom needs to be better managed. The WTTC forecast in April that the country’s tourism sector will grow by 24% this year compared to 2019, creating 126,000 new jobs and accounting for around 20% of the national economy. Property prices were already pricing more and more people out of the property market, partly due to the growing influx of foreign investors and tourists seeking short-term rental properties.
In response, Lisbon announced it would halve the number of tuk-tuks allowed to carry tourists around the city and build more parking spaces for them after residents complained they were hindering traffic.
The town of Sintra, 40 minutes west by train, has invested in more parking outside the town and in cheaper youth hostels near the centre, the mayor’s office said. Sintra Town Hall said by email that fewer tickets are now being sold for nearby historic sites. Pena Palace, for example, has admitted fewer than half of the 12,000 tickets per day it used to sell.
That’s not enough, say residents who have joined together in Sintra, an association that is calling on the municipality to put citizens first through better communication. They also want to know how the government plans to control guests at a new hotel that is to be built to increase overnight stays, and how it plans to limit the number of cars and visitors allowed.
“We are not against tourists,” the group’s manifesto states. “We are against the chaos that (local leaders) cannot solve.”
