Thousands of Spaniards to descend on Málaga to protest against mass tourism

Tourists in Málaga. The city has undergone a rapid process of gentrification. Photograph: AndKa/Alamy

Thousands of people from across southern Spain are expected to take to the streets of Málaga on Saturday in the latest in a series of protests against mass tourism.

Demonstrators from the popular Andalusian destinations of Granada, Seville and Cádiz will join others in the Mediterranean city following recent protests in the Canary and Balearic islands, with another scheduled for a week later in Barcelona.

With the number of visitors to Spain expected to top 100 million this year, more than double the country’s population, there is a growing sense even within the tourism industry that things have reached a tipping point.

Complaints range from those about the saturation of public space and facilities such as public transport to the obliteration of local businesses, but the nub of the problem is housing. The highly lucrative tourist apartment trade has swallowed up housing stock, driven out local residents and hollowed out historic urban areas.

Málaga, until recently a jumping off point for visitors to the densely built resorts of the Costa del Sol, has become a destination in its own right, undergoing a rapid process of gentrification that is pricing residents out of their homes. Catherine Powell, the global head of hosting at Airbnb, said the city was its most searched-for destination.

“The people who work in the tourism industry can’t afford the rent in their own city. As long as housing is seen as a marketable asset, there won’t be a solution,” said Curro Machuca of the Málaga tenants’ union. “We believe that basing the economy of Málaga on the monoculture of tourism is unsustainable and has to change.”

Olalla Luque Colmenero of the Granada pressure group Albayzín Habitable – which campaigns for the city’s historic Albayzín quarter, a Unesco world heritage site – said residents were key to the area.

“It’s all very well being a world heritage site but it isn’t just about architecture, the heritage is the people and their traditions as well and the social aspect, which is what we’re losing,” she said, adding that the tourist apartment boom had meant there were virtually no homes to rent in the area. “Tourism is important to the city but what we object to is tourism that pushes people out of their homes.”

The Barcelona mayor, Jaume Collboni, last week made headlines when he announced that licences for the city’s 10,000 legal tourist apartments would not be renewed when they expired in 2028. Other cities are expected to follow suit.

Martí Cusó, a Barcelona housing activist, is one of the organisers of next Saturday’s demonstration in the city, where protesters representing than 80 organisations will march under the slogan: Enough! Let’s put limits on tourism. He described the move by Collboni as “propaganda more than anything” and said mass tourism that made housing more expensive left many impoverished.

“We need to stop spending €80m a year on promoting the city abroad,” said Cusó. “It’s not just about limiting tourism but guaranteeing the rights of the people who live here.”