José Antonio Donaire’s job is to diminish the impact of the nearly 16 million annual visitors to the Catalan capital. Here’s what he’s planning
Barcelona’s Boqueria market is so packed with visitors these days that many stalls that once sold fresh vegetables, fish or meat to home cooks now offer takeaway cups of cut fruit or fried shrimp to tourists instead. Convinced the market no longer caters to them, many locals have given up on it. José Antonio Donaire, a neighborhood resident, however, still shops there, albeit strategically. “Normally the back of a market is less attractive; it’s where the products are unloaded,” he said. “But at the Boqueria, it’s the reverse. We locals always enter through the back to avoid the traffic jam at the front.”
As Barcelona’s new officer for sustainable tourism, Mr. Donaire is developing strategies to diminish the impact of the nearly 16 million tourists who visit the Catalan capital annually. Created last year, his position builds on the work the government started nearly a decade ago when it enacted its first policy aimed at restraining the overtourism that has contributed to soaring housing prices; overwhelmed public transport; and turned historic areas into dens of tatty souvenirs and microwaved paella. Other initiatives have since followed, including a tourist tax on accommodations and a ban on vacation rentals that goes into effect in 2028.
Barcelona wants not merely to check overtourism, but to reverse it. Under his guidance, Barcelona is aiming to restore residential life in neighborhoods hit hardest by tourism’s negative effects. That includes a plan to make the Boqueria a place where Barcelonans again want to shop — and maybe even enter through the front gates. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity:
Barcelona began rethinking tourism with innovative measures like the ban on new hotel construction back in 2017. Despite efforts to mitigate tourism for the past 10 years, numbers continue to rise. But the message of the city now is: not one tourist more. The city has decided cap a number that otherwise rises infinitely. We don’t want to grow more. We want the tourists that the city already has. There were 15.7 million tourists in the city in 2025 — that’s the threshold. Sixteen million is the absolute maximum.
We are not coming at this from an anti-tourist position. But we need to manage tourism in an orderly way, and the first management objective is to change the kinds of tourists who come. Right now, two-thirds are leisure tourists; we want the makeup to be a third business travel, a third cultural travel and a third leisure. So, we are doing promotions directed at those niches that are interested in cultural experiences — not just elevated ones, like going to the Liceu theater, but also other popular ones, like live music or festivals. If you look at the tourism website, you’ll see the slogan has changed from “Visit Barcelona” to “This Is Barcelona,” from telling people to come to see the sights to telling them who we are as a city.
You can’t prevent leisure tourists from coming, can you? – “That’s the effect of setting the limits. The demand can’t grow if there’s no accommodations for them. Already this summer we’re seeing that there are people who can’t come because they can’t find a place to stay. We’re not going to respond to growing demand”. The mayor has also just announced a proposal to eliminate cruise ships that only stop for the day. “We want zero day-tripping cruise passengers, and to deter them from visiting, we’re going to ask the regional authorities to raise the tax on them to the maximum allowed. We want it be so high that it doesn’t make sense to come into the city”.
Tourist tax on accommodations is also an attempt to dissuade tourists, and it allows the city to offset the expensive costs of tourism. We want to be able to say to residents that all the services that tourists use — security, sanitation, electricity, transport — are subsidized entirely by the tourist tax. We believe that a resident should not have to be responsible for the services that a visitor borrows. We want to invest these resources in strategies designed to recover the city’s identity. In some ways, you could say that tourists are financing the “detouristification” of Barcelona.
It’s important to us that any resident can buy a loaf of bread, a book or a screw in their neighborhood. That’s what makes someone feel emotionally connected to their city. We also believe that tourists will be more interested in a city where urban space isn’t entirely souvenirs, phone cases and kebabs. Therefore, support will be given to shops that are clearly directed at residents. And there is a strict usage law that prevents the number of tourist establishments from increasing.
Barcelona gets 13 percent of its revenue from tourism. We don’t want to threaten prosperity, but we have to have a hierarchy of priorities. And at the top of our order is the citizen’s right to live in the city. If another priority comes into conflict with that, the top one prevails. We want a city where everyone can prosper.