[This text was read in the 30th September demonstration in Las Ramblas (Barcelona)]
Welcome to Touristland (once Barcelona)
Population: 0 (all where expelled due to the housing prices)
We don’t want to spoil your holidays. We just want to provide you with some information which your tourist agent will never tell you.
¿What’s Touristland?
• In the place where once was the city of Barcelona, now there’s a big theme park
• This city has promoted an economic model based in image, tourism and real state.
• While thousands of tourists walk around the city, its inhabitants suffer from the devastating effects of this model, called by the politicians themselves “Barcelona trade mark”
¿Why work the whole year to pay our holidays in cities that don’t exist? Massive tourist attack
• Big urban plans and hundreds of hotels have destroyed the social tissue of the city and have expropriated thousands of neighbours that had to leave their homes.
• The city is now full of souvenirs shops, bars, discos, irish pubs and false italian cafeterias, fast food restaurants and absurd tourist attractions.
• In the meantime, behind the facades of the city there are neighbours suffering the unstoppable rise of housing prices.
• More than 200.000 people have left the city since 1986 because they couldn’t find an affordable place to live here.
• 2.500 neighbours were expelled due to the construction of Rambla del Raval.
• Real state market has promoted forms of silent violence against old people living in old flats dowtown in order to scare them and make them leave their homes.
• Most of these flats are now rented to tourists per days (with very expensive prices).
• Public space is crowded and you cannot stay in streets and squares without paying or buying.
Things you can do in Barcelona (and, actually, in every city center of the world)
Buying a lot
Circulating
Taking photos and videos of boring and not interesting things
Drinking lots of bad sangria and beer. Eating preheated paella. Buying mexican (!!) hats.
¿Who is gaining from all this nonsense?
•••••
This demonstration is NOT a tourist attraction.
Mass tourism is boring, expensive and it has devastating effects on the everyday life of the Barcelona inhabitants.
