Under the motto “World Tourism Day = Collapse Tourism Day”, the network of cities in southern Europe (SET) that aims to deal with the tourist industry will take advantage of this Tuesday to disseminate a critical vision of tourism. It was founded in 2018, promoted by San Sebastian, Venice, Seville, Lisbon, Malta, Madrid, Girona, Córdoba, etc. Since then, several territories have been added to the network.

“Local governments and state governments have allocated a large amount of public resources to tourism companies (housing and transport), despite the fact that many of them are large multinationals with profits of millions of euros that generate social, economic and environmental damage,” they have denounced. The growth of the urban space under private management, such as the terraces of the bars that have ended up occupying even more space with the pandemic, influences the “commodification of the urban space and the daily living conditions”.

After the pandemic, they recall that this summer mass tourism has returned and that with it “the processes of exploitation and precarization of the population” have come.

In addition to the denunciation, this International Tourism Day has taken the opportunity to demand from the institutions real commitments to reduce and limit the number of tourist and passenger places in ports and airports; permanent cessation of any expansion of port and airport infrastructures; real commitment to climate change; territorial relocation of the reduction and production of displacements; active policies against gentrification, the commercialization of spaces and the expulsion of residents.