Tourists don't see us. Sometimes I walk down Passeig de Gràcia to La Rambla and, when I reach my destination, I realize that I was the one dodging people, and not them. They occupy the space in a parsimonious way, in a group, while living an experience that neither lifelong Barcelona residents nor Catalans who have gone to live there are part of, encouraged by a model - economic, territorial, cultural - which is hypercentralist. The version of itself that Barcelona sells to the world is a distortion made to attract. Every time it sells, the city subtracts livability from itself. We often talk about how the capital city petrifies until it becomes inert scenery, but what makes Barcelona attractive is the possibility of experiencing a kind of immersion in its lifestyle, of making reels of the Spanish slow life, of thinking that you have found the calm disorder and the perfect climate that will allow you to rest. More than superficial beauty, the capital sells the possibility of quenching a thirst for a specific sense of well-being. Living what they think is our authenticity, however, the current tourist model makes Barcelona less and less authentic. Deforming itself in order to be consumed, the city also deforms for its residents. In Barcelona you live with anxiety.
The debate over tourism - and this obviously includes ex-pats - is a debate with many factors and many derivatives which makes it easy to justify not getting too involved. "We all do tourism", understood, but not every city in the world is the capital of my country. And not every city in the world tries to gain the prestige it thinks it lacks - a product of not being the capital of a state - in order to fatten up its tourism brand limitlessly. The abstraction with which the issue is treated leads to superficiality, and superficiality leads to a model of debate that is binary and flawed: economic progress yes, or economic progress no. The problem, however, is that there is no economic prosperity possible in the long term if the current economic model does not guarantee that there will be a city in the long term. The country looks with suspicion at problems that require profound changes to the model. Even among the voters or potential voters of the parties that embrace this city model less critically, there are those who are aware that the Barcelona that is being promoted is not only unsustainable, but that it affects the day-to-day, and the intimate relationships that those who live there have with the place. Once again, what should be a public debate ends up becoming a private problem. Politics shrugs off the problems from above and transfers them to the people.
No economic prosperity is possible in the long term if the current economic model does not guarantee that there will be a city in the long term
Of all the things that have led to Barcelona having the tourism model it has and of all the things that would allow us to get out of it, most of us only know what affects us personally. Every time a tourist walks past below my balcony drunk and shouting on a Sunday night, I curse the inability of this country and this city to look hard at themselves. Today I will walk down Passeig de Gràcia while there is I don't know what F1 show happening, and I will have to believe that it is good for the city that this happens and, consequently, that it is good for those of us who live there. The current city model, the idea of the city and the progress to which it must aspire, requires a constant act of faith from Barcelona residents, it forces them to say to themselves that every setback, every moment in which they understand how the tourist model affects their daily life is worth it for a higher good that they are not yet able to glimpse.
Confronting the tourism model and agitating the background that turns it into a conflict, has often been seen, on the left-right axis, as a priority of the most extreme positions of the left. But everything that affects the community foundations and threatens them, everything that undoes the collective structure that supports the country and, above all, everything that involves protecting the quality of life of citizens in all areas, is prudent to address from conservative positions. In fact, it is imperative that it be treated in these terms if we do not want conservatism and liberalism, in a country with a destructured and ideologically dismantled right like ours, to be synonymous. You don't have to have voted for the CUP - in fact, fewer and fewer people vote for the CUP - to realize that, through major sporting events and Vivaris, it feels like the capital is slipping out of our hands, that it is disconnected from the rest of the country and that many Barcelona residents live there militantly resisting the urge to leave. In Barcelona, not only is the national battle being fought more fiercely in cultural terms, but it is also fighting to lay the foundations of a country model that does not turn us into servants of tourism. Today, "Barcelona lives from tourism" is synonymous with "Barcelona dies for tourism", and it seems that, after all the great proclamations, no one has the heart to turn it around.