An American traveler reflects on his first encounter with Barcelona's "Tourists Go Home" graffiti
I remember the first time I saw one of Barcelona’s infamous anti-tourist signs. I was walking through Gracia one sweltering afternoon, minding my own business, when I was stopped by the sight of a black mass of graffiti scrawled across the corner of an otherwise nondescript residential building. It was scribbled in messy but legible English, positioned almost at eye-level, ideally placed to catch passerby’s attention. It caught mine, and as I paused to study the words they glared back at me: “Tourists go home.”
At first I felt attacked. They’re talking about me, aren’t they? I thought to myself, looking over my shoulder to make sure I was alone. I felt a mix of shame and indignation, offended that some anonymous punk would accuse me, a friendly, well-intentioned visitor, of being a tourist worthy of banishment. But just quickly as they came on the feelings subsided, replaced conveniently with the certainty that no, of course they’re not talking about me.
Surely they are talking about some other bumbling American tourist. Some other guiri.
I walked on, relieved at having avoided what could have been an uncomfortable ethical predicament. And yet I was surprised at my reaction to the sign, given that I had been warned a number of times about Gracia’s unique form of hospitality when it came to tourists. I had been in Barcelona for over a week at that point, crashing at a friend’s place in Eixample, but that hot afternoon was my first visit to Gracia, which had been described to me by that same friend as one of the city’s “hippest” enclaves, a kind of Williamsburg of Barcelona. The comparison was not exactly apt, of course, but I got the picture, imagining a neighborhood full of cute sidewalk cafes and restaurants, boutique stores and bars, and young (or youngish) artsy people. Like Williamsburg, I was also told it was a tight-knit community, a place where neighbors knew each other’s names, where children played in the streets, where rents were still reasonably affordable.
But the features that made Gracia a livable home forlocals had also made it an attractive destination for outsiders, and lately the neighborhood had begun to struggle with the kind of theme park tourism that has overwhelmed the city at large in recent decades. It was also, I was told, one of the neighborhoods fighting back against this wave of tourism — of which the graffiti was just one example.
I moved to Brooklyn in my mid 20s from outside New York City, so I know what it’s like to be a gentrifier, and to be confronted with the effects — and to wrestle with the guilt — of that role. But I had never, or had only rarely, been confronted with it in my travels abroad, whic tend to take me to places further afield than the U.S. or Europe. Gracia was a place that, to some extent, looked and felt like home, and so it wasn’t as difficult to relate to the struggles of the people there. I could imagine all the petty — and not so petty — annoyances that mass tourism had foisted on residents: crowded streets and terraces, skyrocketing housing prices, tourists’ general lack of respect for people and property. And as someone who dislikes crowds, noise, and drunk English chads as much as your average Gracia resident, I felt some of these annoyances myself while spending time in the neighborhood.
Of course, I was also a tourist, and so I wondered whether I wasn’t guilty of inflicting my own obliviousness on Gracia as well. In the days following that first graffiti, I encountered other forms of anti-tourist messaging that reminded me of my outsider status. There were the dozens of other “tourists go home” signs, some more explicit than others, that I passed while walking the streets on a daily basis. There was the curmudgeonly restaurant owner who ranted constantly about estos putos guiris, even when those guiris — or especially when those guiris — were his own customers. And there was, most memorably, the very anti-tourist themed street installation at Festes de Gràcia, at the entrance of which stood a life-size, paper-mache sculpture of a sun-burnt and overweight guiri, clothed in a Hawaii shirt with rats gnawing on his cardboard toes.
At some point amid the barrage of guiri-hate I became paranoid, wondering if this messaging was in fact meant for me, wondering whether I wasn’t also part of the problem. Looking for some outlet for my guilt, I began incessantly asking a local Spanish friend, not a native of Barcelona but a longtime resident, if I was missing something. Should I be taking this more personally? “But you're not that kind of tourist,” she assured me. “They're talking about those other tourists, the bad tourists, the guiris.”
I found her attempt to console me kind, but maybe too charitable. What, exactly, is the difference between a good and bad tourist?
On the one hand the difference should be obvious. “Bad” tourists are the ones you read about in the news, the ones whose lack of self-awareness and plain old stupidity compels them to undertake such cringeworthy acts as posing for selfies in front of “tourists go home” signs, big grins stretched across their faces. They are the young English stags who stumble around Raval drunk and shirtless at night, and who kill themselves in small droves each year “balconing” in places like Majorca; they are the zombie hordes of American vacationers who pile out of their cruise ships in the harbor each morning only to eat at chain restaurants and take photos in front of the Sagrada Familia. These are hopeless cases, in my opinion, and no number of confrontations with anti-tourist street art is likely to reform their ugly behavior.
“Good” tourists, on the other hand, are ones who are capable of some level of respect and empathy, who come to a place like Barcelona in search of something other than a souvenir shot glass or postcard, something more meaningful, a deeper connection to or understanding of the place and its people. They might eat at a local taverna before a McDonald’s, or buy some handcrafted art before a cheap tchotchke made in China. They might even speak a bit of Spanish — or, if they’re really high-quality, know a few words of Catalan. The marketing geniuses in the travel industry have lately invented labels for these types of travelers: “ethical” or “sustainable” tourists, shorthand for tourists with a conscience.
But a piece of graffiti on a wall in Gracia doesn’t discriminate between good and bad tourists, which begs the question: do the artists who put them there believe there is really a meaningful difference? Some weeks into my Barcelona stay my suspicions to the contrary were confirmed when I met up with a friend from out of town, a former journalism classmate who was visiting the city for a few days as part of a whirlwind itinerary that also included Italy and Austria. She was staying in Gracia, and she too had just that morning encountered her first anti-tourist graffiti. My friend, mind you, undoubtedly considers herself a “good” tourist — someone who takes an interest in the local culture, makes it a point to eat and shop at local businesses, and only occasionally stays — as she was then — in Airbnbs.
And yet when I asked her about her reaction to the anti-tourist messaging, she too found a way to avoid association with the word, convincing herself that her own moral strictures about travel put her in a class above the rest. Her judgement went even further: “Maybe it’s not the tourists they should be wo rried about,” she remarked, “but the people here catering to them, like the Airbnbs.”
Putting aside the irony of the part about Airbnbs, it was a tone-deaf observation even to my ears. And it was made even more embarrassing by the fact that accompanying us to dinner that night was my Spanish friend, to whom I was still trying to prove that I was not the ignorant outsider I feared myself to be. But rather than treat her to an enlightened conversation about the ethics of sustainable travel, instead I had forced her to listen to yet another American expat, a supposedly “good” tourist, whose first impulse was not only to deny being a tourist but to place the blame for Barcelona’s tourism problems on residents rather than tourists themselves — on the victims rather than the perpetrators.
I left the dinner in shame, remembering that my visiting friend and I both had had the same initial reaction to the sign. If even so-called enlightened tourists can be this dense, I thought, are we any better than the mindless masses who come only to consume a place and return home unchanged? Clearly, refined tastes and a smattering of Spanish is no real indication that a person has anymore awareness about themselves or the impact they have on a place than your run-of-the- mill guiri, as my friend’s comment demonstrated. And even tourists capable of a modicum of introspection — such as, I'd like to believe, myself — can quickly slip into a kind of “holier-than-thou” mentality around other travelers, blinding them just as easily to any real understanding of a foreign community’s struggles or their role in perpetuating them.
My local friend, seeking again to assuage my guilt, was supportive. “This is the problem with the anti-tourist stuff,” she remarked. “It makes even the good tourists feel like they don’t belong.”
“Only a good tourist with a conscience could have an existential crisis after seeing a ‘tourists go home’ sign,” she added with a smirk.
Still, I wasn’t so sure. And in the absence of any neat and tidy answers, I’m left wondering what that anonymous punk, the graffiti’s author, might say in response. Would they differentiate between a good and bad tourist? Do they think tourism can be sustainable — and if so, what would that look like? Am I, in their minds, just another guiri, too?
Or maybe the artist had already made their point. If their work is any indication, perhaps the only good tourists are the ones who “go home” — and stay there.
Este artículo es parte de The Posttraumatic VOL.6 "It's Hard to Focus Today".
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