Nan Palmero was at a rehearsal dinner in Mexico City’s trendy Roma Norte neighborhood, ahead of a wedding of two American friends, when he heard a “rumbling” outside.
From the restaurant’s second story, Palmero described seeing a large group of people moving through the streets, some holding placards, shouting “Gringos leave.”
He later learned that demonstrators smashed restaurant windows and damaged vehicles, including the new car of his friends’ wedding planner — a local resident — he said.
“They wrecked her car, they smashed a window, they ripped off a mirror, they spray-painted the side of it. It was really pretty nasty,” he said.
Palmero, an avid traveler from San Antonio, Texas, said he had heard that an influx of digital nomads and foreign tourists had pushed up prices in some of the city’s most popular neighborhoods.
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Mexico City residents march against overtourism as protests move beyond Europe
But he was not aware that residents were organizing demonstrations, like those that he had read about in Barcelona and other parts of Europe, he said.
“People … want to go and experience these beautiful and wonderful cultures around the world,” he said, adding that “we affect the thing that we’re trying to experience in a negative way.”
Protests on the rise
Protests against tourists have increased in frequency and size as residents — who got a snippet of their cities without tourists during the pandemic — have seen tourism return to, or even exceed, pre-pandemic levels, said Bernadett Papp, senior researcher at European Tourism Futures Institute in the Netherlands.
Residents typically choose protests, instead of other forms of lobbying, because they generate public awareness, which leads to media coverage and societal pressure for governments to act, she said. This happened in Barcelona, while other forms of societal pressure elevated tourism on policy agendas in Amsterdam, she said.
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Source CNBC
