How many tourists are in Barcelona per day?
The estimated number of tourists present per day in Barcelona in 2022 ranged from 45000 in winter to 110000 in summer. These estimations are equivalent to about 2.77% and 6.71% of the total resident population (about 1.64 million in 2022).
Some would argue that these numbers are excessive. Tourism is a controversial issue in Barcelona. It is not difficult to find a tourists go home written on a wall while walking around the city. The diffusion of apartments turístic and habitatges d’ús turístic (tourist apartments and Air BnB) is an especially heated topic. These in particular are suspected to lead to tourism saturation as well as generate demand pressure in the rental and sale markets of private properties. Without getting any deeper into such controversy, let alone take a side in it, this analysis only gives a look at some of the macro dimensions involved. To uncover those dimensions, I addressed two related questions:
Where do Barcelona’s tourists stay at night and in what kind of lodging?
How many tourists are (approximatively) in Barcelona on any given day?
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
- The trend in tourist arrivals shows a fast and near complete recovery to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2022.
- All lodging categories combined amounted to about 145.000 night stay places in 2022. That suggests a full capacity equivalent to almost 9% of the total resident population (about 1.64 millions in 2022). The vast majority of these places are geographically concentrated in few neighbourhoods, most notably in la Dreita de l’ Eixample.
- The most controversial lodging categories, the tourist apartments and Air BnBs, account for more than 40% of the total number of places available in the city. This percentage does not include unlicenced/illegal structures. These lodging categories are also the most spread out in terms of geographical distribution.
Depending on the neighborhood and period of the year, perceptions may vary on how many tourists are out there and whether or not the city has already reached saturation levels. Residents in touristic neighbourhoods are clearly the most exposed, especially during the touristic season for obvious reasons. Touristic apartments are likely to be perceived as yet another strain in already concentrated areas, but also as a potential threat in non-touristic neighbourhoods due to their more pervasive geographical distribution.
METHODS and SOURCES:
Estimations on the number of tourists per day are derived from data on monthly arrivals, combined with data on average night stay per lodging category. The Data Cleaning page contains in-depth details on the methods and sources used in this analysis.
Extraction, transformation and loading tools: Jupyter Lab, Python (webscraping, api), Google BigQuery (SQL)
Source: official statistics from the Ajuntament de Barcelona’s open data service
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