Overtourism in Porto: I'm Part of the Problem

Porto as an idea.

Porto in reality.

How I felt nearly all of the time in Porto: besieged by werewolves.

More and more places are realizing that they're ill-equipped to deal with the number of people who want to visit them. Venice, Barçelona and Amsterdam are probably the best-known examples of locals turning on the droves of tourists who descend each vacation season--seasons that are getting longer and longer to the point where the idea of an "off-season" starts to seem like a quaint relic of a more innocent age. Our first night in Lisbon, we made an ill-fated choice to walk down Rua Augusta, which turned out to be one of the cookie-cutter retail streets you see anywhere in European cities now, marked by chocolate shops and "luxury" brand outlets. But Rua Augusta also had a lively trade in street merchants, selling everything from clothing to handbags and liquor from blankets spread out on the ground. Between the vendors, the tourists, buskers and break-dancing crews, the outdoor café seating and the occasional vehicle traffic, there was almost no room to move. It was like leaving a championship sports event after a last-minute, come-from-behind miracle, with a packed stadium all hitting the exit tunnels as once. 

But Porto's Centro Historico neighborhood seems to be angling to join the club of loved-to-death places. Whereas Rua Augusta was one easily-avoidable street in Lisbon, Centro Historico was just as crowded and sprawled for blocks and blocks, uphill through narrow streets, all around the central transportation hub of São Bento, and down to the banks of the River Douro. Basically, in August 2024, you could just substitute the word Porto in this lament about overtourism in Bologna, and substitute pastel de nata, bacalhau, or sardinhas for mortadella, and everything else is exactly the same. The shoulder to shoulder crowds, led through narrow streets by "free" walking tours, the authenticity giving way to tacky monoculture. There are also the ancillary nuisances--litter, drunkenness, aggressive panhandling, and intrusive street performers with talent ranging from embarrassing to mediocre-but-unnecessary, pandering to the crowds with songs that have nothing to do with the local culture (modern or traditional). I must have heard 10 different versions of Radiohead's "Creep" over the course of a week, about twice a day, every day--all of them bad, even (maybe especially) if you like the original (I do not).

These are just some of the aesthetic considerations that make both living in and traveling to tourist destinations (be it Bali, Phuket, Macchu Pichu) such a drag. Residents lose out on housing that is converted to short-term rentals, and mixed tourism and residential zones become deserts when it comes to day-to-day necessities such as grocery stores. The only place to buy any groceries near where we stayed in Porto was a sad little Minipreço outlet, basically not much more than a 7-11. You could get basic things and it was crowded at all hours, principally with tourists buying sodas, snacks, beers, or cases of bottled water.

But I can tell you from experience, it's not a lot of fun to be a visitor, either. No one wants their dinner interrupted by a boombox dance troupe trying to gather a crowd at the edge of their table. No one wants to wait for hours to get into a famous museum, church, of local site. But once you get to a travel destination and learn the truth, your only options other than to go home immediately (never going to happen) are to go with it, or plan other diversions further afield. We ended up doing both--although the latter strategy can itself be a trap if you venture outward by booking bus or ferry tours to nearby attractions, such as Douro Valley's wine country in Porto's case. You not only end up in a movable version of the overcrowded, homogenized scene you are trying to avoid, but these packages help reinforce overtourism to the extent that the departure point becomes a good base of operations for visiting a region more generally.

So if neither the residents nor visitors are happy with today's travel experience, surely the tourism phenomenon must be due for a change? Probably not. The most obvious reason is the money that tourism brings. International travel spending is expected to reach a record $11 trillion in 2024. Few places will willingly forego whatever share of that they can get. For all its residents' complaints, the city of Barçelona still maintains an official program to promote tourism. So does Amsterdam, despite its recent well-publicized campaign to discourage "nuisance" tourists who want to partake in the city's perfectly-legal cannabis and brothels.

Basic demographics also puts a kybosh on the idea that places are besieged by "revenge traveling" since the pandemic lockdowns ended. The world has added a billion people since 2010, and more than half of the planet's 8 billion people can now be said to belong to an affluent global middle class, with over 100 million joining their ranks each year. More people being able meet the basic needs of life and still have money left over to enjoy leisure is good news, in the big picture. But while the number of people with the means to travel is increasing, the number of pristine beaches, virgin wildernesses, ancient ruins, Renaissance masterpieces, and baroque cathedrals is not. Short of some global event that wipes out the financial security of billions of people without redistributing it to others who would replace them as travelers, tourists will keep coming in greater numbers than popular destinations can handle.

This is not revenge. It's simply the demand for tourist experiences outstripping the existing and foreseeable supply. In a simpler time, an economist might have told you, with as straight a face as he or she could muster, that prices would rise until demand leveled off, achieving a tourism equilibrium. But if tourism levels off in destinations that are already overtouristed, they will still be left overtouristed. Just in a way that more satisfactorily comports with economic theory, I guess. Hooray?

Besides, the textbook examples of equilibrium focus on things like bushels of apples getting so expensive that consumers will switch to alternatives like bushels of pears. But what is the alternative for international travel? If there was one, people would have stayed home for it in the first place, rather than crammed themselves into a tiny airplane seat for hours just to stand in line even longer for some attraction, getting heat rash while being serenaded by another banjo rendition of "Wonderwall"?

The other oft-cited factors in overtourism are social media and popular culture. The laziest line of this thinking says that we all went to Porto (or Kyoto, or wherever) because some social media influencer took a kissy-face/peace sign selfie in some garden, on some beach, or in front of some famous monument. Diabolical if true (I knew we should have just stopped kissy-face girl's reign of terror when we had the chance!). It's also in line with the satisfying notion that Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tik Tok have ruined everything about contemporary life, rather than simply revealing how awful we've all been, deep inside, all along.

But no. Books, movies, and TV shows also come in for their share of the blame. We are told that Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code" (I've never read it) ruined La Basilique du Sacre Cœur, which was further ruined by Tom Hanks in the film version (never saw it). "Emily in Paris" (never saw it) ruined Paris more generally, without any help from Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, or Woody Allen before it. And anyway, those guys are all dead. Meanwhile, Bali may have been ruined by "Eat, Pray, Love" (never read or saw it). In Porto, Livraria Lello was reputed to be ruined by its appearance in, or inspiration for, something written by J.K. Rowling--hence the required advance ticket purchase and very long lines to visit this beautiful bookstore. At least that's what I overheard from a walking tour guide. We sadly did not wait in line to see for ourselves what was all the fuss.

I've lived most of my adult life in tourist destinations--not necessarily to be near landmarks, but certainly as a result of my own informed choices. I'm sympathetic to locals who say that the chaos of mass tourism upends both their financial prospects and their peace of mind. It's easy to say things like "well, you always have the option to leave," or worse, "be happy it's supporting the local economy." But for people who face housing shortages or find that their employment prospects have narrowed to servicing the needs of visitors, mass tourism seems to be a form of gentrification in that it doesn't deliver economic benefits on par with the long-term losses. Someone's getting rich, but it's not the person who commutes 45 minutes each way by train to change the bed sheets--and not necessarily someone whose family has been there for generations. You might not agree with protest stunts such as shooting tourists with squirt guns while they dine al fresco, (something which would certainly turn violent, if not deadly in the US or UK), but besieged locals have legitimate and serious complaints.

That said, no matter how much they complain and protest, economic interests and demographics will ensure that people will keep coming. And by "people", I mean me. After our Porto experience and reading about more and more places that are being loved to death, I'm definitely going to do more due-diligence about future travel destinations. But there's just too much world for me to just stop trying to see as much of it as I can during the remainder of my short time in it. If I may invoke the classic documentary Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, people like to think they are kind and gentle like Charlie Bucket when in fact most travelers, myself included, are more like spoiled Veruca Salt. We want an Oompah-Loompah now!

[Now that I think about, the original Willy Wonka film is pretty much a parable of the current overtourism situation, as the kids are basically being themselves while on a tour of a strange and wondrous place. Veruca is imperious, rude, and entitled; Mike Teevee acts as if everything exists only for his cheap entertainment; Augustus Gloop embodies voracious gluttony, while ultra-competitive Violet Beauregard pushes mundane situations beyond the boundaries of decency, safety and taste (literally). Even Charlie, the model of the polite, respectful guest, can't help but cross the line into forbidden indulgence in this strange, foreign environment--drinking, to be precise. Which I guess puts Mr. Wonka in the role of the overtouristed host destination, enticing the world to his exclusive miracle factory, knowing it's a trap and not willing to make much of an effort to prevent the worst outcomes, preferring instead to refer his hapless guests to the fine print, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I say Good Day, Sir!]

At any rate ...

Ilaria Maria Sala, who wrote the New York Times elegy for Bologna, ends the piece rhetorically, with "Must we really travel like this?" Without parsing too much, by including "like this" she's asking the readers ("we") to consider how they can travel more responsibly, with more care and attention given to local sensibilities. She is correct to do so, and guidance for ethical travel is plentiful, sound, and reasonable. Basically, it boils down to (1) travel off-season, (2) try to go to lesser-visited places, (3) treat the places and the locals the way you'd want your own neighborhood to be treated by visitors.

The question is whether it will work. I have my doubts.

Seasonality is determined not just by weather, but by when people are available to travel. The big gluts come in the summer when kids are out of school, leaving hordes of college students and families with children to join the hordes of retirees (ahem) and other child-free people who enjoy more flexible travel schedules (but travel in the summer anyway, whether or not they are fleeing the Olympics).

You can try to go to less-visited places--though to find them you will need either a local guide or some other resource to learn about them. Which is to say, tourists will have to do work, violating Rob Long's principle of laziness a business model. Otherwise, going further afield is best left to people who are adventurous (or desperate) enough to just go somewhere with transportation options and then head in a random direction by whatever means are at hand. It worked for us in Portugal and kept us most days out of Centro Historico (though we would return to the chaos each night). But as a sustainable travel strategy, it's just a game of Whac-A-Mole. Today's hidden gem is tomorrow's Sintra.

As for getting tourists to behave themselves ... the less said the better. Though I am curious about where people in Barçelona, Venice, Amsterdam et al. go for their summers--the ones who are not working in hotels and restaurants, or leading walking tours, that is. Every year, restaurants, stores and businesses in Paris close down as a huge chunk of Parisians clear out of town for the entire month of August. They've got to go somewhere, and I wonder if they are more conscientious travelers given the relentless tourism they experience in Paris. It probably depends on where they live. We're lucky to have several sites that act as tourist flytraps--the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, Trocadero, the Champs Elysées, the Opera House, Disneyland Paris--so the pain gets spread around. There are even places where tourists go that do not feel overrun and tacky to Parisians. Good sense prevents me from naming these places, of course.

Alternately, Sala could have ended her essay by asking "Must we really permit travel like this?" And the "we" would have referred to whomever has influence on whomever has authority to regulate tourism like any other polluting or disruptive industry. Which is to say "nobody" in non-democratic places like the Socialist Republic of Vietnam or nominally democratic places like the Republic of Indonesia or the Republic of Peru. But it's too cynical to believe that people in reasonably functioning democracies like Spain, the Netherlands, or Italy can't get action more substantive than Venice's lame 5€ day-visitor's fee--an amount so low and ineffective as to signal how little the local and regional governments care about the issue.

And there certainly are policies that local and national governments could put in place to curb overtourism. As a person with absolutely no experience, training, or education in the economics, politics, or social impact of local tourism development, I can think of several off the top of my head:

• Ban cruise ships from docking in local ports
• Ban AirBnB, VRBO, and any other conversions of housing to short-term rentals, and ruthlessly enforce the ban
• Restrict public transit to local residents
• Add a 100% surcharge to all hotel stays
• Establish special visas for visits to certain regions and require hotels to obtain proof that guests are either nationals or visa holders
• Never, under any circumstances, hold international events such as America's Cup (Barçelona 2024, San Francisco, 2013) or the Olympics (Barçelona 1992, Paris 2024)

Policies like these might not be easy to get past the local business interests. Some are probably illegal in some places, but when has a potential court challenge ever stopped a local government from passing a dubious law? And every one of these suggestions would certainly result in financial losses that would need to be offset by other economic activity. But they would be more effective than squirting people while they're eating tapas.

So as an answer, to Sala's question: No, we don't have to travel this way.

But we probably will.