Overtourism Chaos: Sintra Residents Fight Back Against Tourist Surge

Sintra (Portugal), Aug 19 (AP) The doorbell to Martinho de Almada Pimentel's house is hard to find, and he likes it that way. It's a long rope that, when pulled, rings a literal bell on the roof that lets him know someone is outside the mountainside mansion that his great-grandfather built in 1914 as a monument to privacy.

There's precious little of that for Pimentel during this summer of “overtourism."

Travelers idling in standstill traffic outside the sunwashed walls of Casa do Cipreste in Cintra sometimes spot the bell and pull the string “because it's funny," he says. With the windows open, he can smell the car exhaust and hear the “tuk-tuk” of outsized scooters named for the sound they make. And he can sense the frustration of 5,000 visitors a day who are forced to queue around the house on the crawl up single-lane switchbacks to Pena Palace, the onetime retreat of King Ferdinand II.

“Now I'm more isolated than during COVID,” the soft-spoken Pimentel, who lives alone, said during an interview this month on the veranda. “Now I try to (not) go out. What I feel is: angry.”

This is a story of what it means to be visited in 2024, the first year in which global tourism is expected to set records since the coronavirus pandemic brought much of life on Earth to a halt.

Wandering is surging, rather than leveling off, driven by lingering revenge travel, digital nomad campaigns and so-called golden visas blamed in part for skyrocketing housing prices.

Cue the violins, you might grouse, for people like Pimentel who are well-off enough to live in places worth visiting. But it's more than a problem for rich people.

“Not to be able to get an ambulance or to not be able to get my groceries is a rich people problem?” said Matthew Bedell, another resident of Sintra, which has no pharmacy or grocery store in the center of the UNESCO-designated district. “Those don't feel like rich people problems to me.”

Overtourism generally describes the tipping point at which visitors and their cash stop benefitting residents and instead cause harm by degrading historic sites, overwhelming infrastructure and making life markedly more difficult for those who live there.

Look a little deeper and you'll find knottier issues for locals and their leaders, none more universal than housing prices driven up by short-term rentals like Airbnb, from Spain to South Africa.

The summer of 2023 was defined by the chaos of the journey itself — airports and airlines overwhelmed, passports a nightmare for travelers from the US. Yet by the end of the year, signs abounded that the COVID-19 rush of revenge travel was accelerating.

In January, the United Nations' tourism agency predicted that worldwide tourism would exceed the records set in 2019 by 2 per cent. By the end of March, the agency reported, more than 285 million tourists had travelled internationally, about 20 per cent more than the first quarter of 2023.

The World Travel and Tourism Council projected in April that 142 of 185 countries it analyzed would set records for tourism, set to generate USD 11.1 trillion globally and account for 330 million jobs.

Aside from the money, there's been trouble in paradise this year, with Spain playing a starring role in everything from water management problems to skyrocketing housing prices and drunken tourist drama.

Protests erupted across the country as early as March, with thousands of people demonstrating in Spain's Canary Islands against visitors and construction that was overwhelming water services and jacking up housing prices.

Japan set records for tourist arrivals. In Fujikawaguchiko, a town that offers some of the best views of Mt Fuji, leaders erected a large black screen in a parking lot to deter tourists from overcrowding the site. The tourists apparently struck back by cutting holes in the screen at eye level.

Air travel, meanwhile, only got more miserable, the US government reported in July.

Tourism is surging and shifting so quickly, in fact, that some experts say the very term “overtourism” is outdated.

Michael O'Regan, a lecturer on tourism and events at Glasgow Caledonian University, argues that “overtourism” doesn't reflect the fact that the experience depends largely on the success or failure of crowd management.

“There's been backlash against the business models on which modern tourism has been built and the lack of response by politicians," he said in an interview. Tourism “came back quicker than we expected,” he allows, but tourists aren't the problem. “So what happens when we get too many tourists? Destinations need to do more research."

Virpi Makela can describe exactly what happens in her corner of Sintra. Incoming guests at Casa do Valle, her hillside bed-and-breakfast near the village center, call Makela in anguish because they cannot figure out how to find her property amid Sintra's “disorganized" traffic rules that seem to change without notice.

“There's a pillar in the middle of the road that goes up and down and you can't go forward because you ruin your car. So you have to somehow come down but you can't turn around, so you have to back down the road,” says Makela, a resident of Portugal for 36 years. “And then people get so frustrated they come to our road, which also has a sign that says `authorized vehicles only.' And they block everything.”

A 40-minute train ride to the west, Sintra's municipality has invested in more parking lots outside town and youth housing at lower prices near the center, the mayor's office said.

More than 3 million people every year visit the mountains and castles of Sintra, long one of Portugal's wealthiest regions for its cool microclimate and scenery. Sintra City Hall also said via email that fewer tickets are now sold to the nearby historic sites. Pena Palace, for example, began this year to permit less than half the 12,000 tickets per day sold there in the past.

It's not enough, say local residents, who have organized into QSintra, an association that's challenging City Hall to “put residents first” with better communication, to start.

They also want to know the government's plan for managing guests at a new hotel being constructed to increase the number of overnight stays, and more limits on the number of cars and visitors allowed.

“We're not against tourists,” reads the group's manifesto. “We're against the pandemonium that (local leaders) cannot resolve.