Maria frantically wondered who she could call for help when her husband, battling cancer at the time, took a fall in their sixth-floor flat in central Lisbon last year. In another era, she might have rushed next door to ask a neighbor for assistance. But that was no longer an option in her 11-unit building, where tourist flats had proliferated, turning long-term residents into a rarity. Maria, 71, resorted to calling the fire department, but the incident crystallized the community she had lost as a ceaseless rotation of tourists moved in and out of all but three of the building’s units.
Maria’s story epitomizes the intimate costs of overtourism for some residents in Spain and Portugal, who have found themselves living in buildings where tourist flats now make up the majority, or even entirety, of units. As visitor numbers hit record levels, these locals are grappling with the disorienting experience of trading longtime neighbors for a steady stream of suitcase-toting strangers in their hallways, elevators, and lobbies.
The Loneliness of the Last Local
“It’s very weird. Imagine, I have no neighbours, even though I’m in the middle of a big city,” shared Alex, the sole remaining resident in a Lisbon building where every other flat is now rented to tourists via platforms like Airbnb. “It’s like I live in a ghost place. There’s plenty of people, I just don’t know anybody.”
For Alex, the abundance of tourist flats has meant taking on the reluctant role of building caretaker, reporting trash left at the entrance and names scratched into the elevator door. “I’m a pain and I hate that too,” Alex said. “I didn’t sign up for this.” The sense of estrangement has grown so acute that Alex and their partner are planning to move. “We can no longer handle not having a community.”
An Inhuman Way to Live
In Barcelona, Esther has spent more than a decade living below two tourist flats, battling the noise from parties that regularly stretch past 3 a.m. “It’s horrible, absolutely horrible,” the 69-year-old said. “It’s inhuman – nobody should live like this.”
Esther has seen all manner of disturbances, from broken bottles and bodily waste in the stairwell to public sex acts on neighboring balconies. The unpredictability of who will turn up next has left her constantly on edge. “You just never know what to expect,” she lamented.
The Lottery of Tourist Behavior
In Lisbon, Joao Povoa, 43, lives “sandwiched” between tourist flats in an 18th-century building ill-equipped to mute the noise of visitors traipsing over wooden floors. “It makes you a bit anxious sometimes,” he said of the “lottery” of not knowing whether the tourists will be respectful. Still, Povoa feels compelled to stay, one of the last bastions of the neighborhood’s traditional community. “We have to try. Because if you give up, then there’s going to be nobody living here.”
The Painful Goodbye
Lurdes Pinheiro finally reached her breaking point last December. After watching neighbors trickle out of her five-story building in Lisbon’s Alfama district over the past decade, only to be promptly replaced by tourists, she and her husband decided to move “to places that still had some community.” Bidding farewell to the few remaining residents was heartbreaking. “One of them started crying, saying: ‘We’re losing all our neighbours’,” Pinheiro recalled. “It was painful, we had been living in the same place for more than 30 years.”
Fighting for Their Homes
Unwilling to accept the gutting of their communities without a fight, some residents are pushing back. In Barcelona, Maite Martin and her neighbors have been battling to prevent the wholesale conversion of their 120-unit building into tourist flats. The conflict has made for surreal scenes, from a tourist vomiting into the building’s interior courtyard to a standoff with an irate drummer who insisted on practicing in his rented holiday flat.
“I’m fighting here, we’re all fighting here, because I think we’ve got to do it,” Martin said, even as she acknowledged that, ultimately, “the landlord, as the owner, has the last say.” The struggle has left her dispirited. “I’m a sociable person, I really am. But it gets to the point that when I see somebody with a suitcase, I just turn away.”
Calls for Change
The outcry against overtourism has swelled into protests across Spain, with residents demanding curbs on visitor numbers and a rethink of the tourism-reliant economic model they blame for driving up housing costs and pushing locals out. In Lisbon, over 6,600 people recently petitioned for a referendum to ban tourist flats in residential buildings altogether.
As officials grapple with how to balance the interests of the tourism industry with those of increasingly disaffected residents, the human toll of overtourism is becoming impossible to ignore. For those clinging to homes in buildings turned de facto hotels, their wrenching stories make plain the urgency of the mission to save the soul of neighborhoods before it’s too late.
