LISBON — Barcelona recently announced a historic decision: It will not be issuing new licenses for short-term rentals, and the current ones will not be renewed after November 2028. But the capital of Spain’s Catalonia region is not the only city taking such initiatives. Recently, several European capitals have started considering ways to discourage tourism, or at least make it more sustainable.
In Portugal, the city of Porto is setting an example with an experiment of “territorial and interesting quarters.”
Where does Lisbon stand in this story? In 2023, more than 20.2 million overnight stays were recorded in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, according to the TravelBI report by Turismo de Portugal. More than 75% of the guests were foreigners.
Grassroot mobilisation
Lisbon has about 548,000 residents — a third of Barcelona’s population — and 19,259 registered short-term rentals, called alojamento local. Although there has been debate about rolling back new licenses and in April 2022 the Supreme Court ruled to ban short-term rentals in residential buildings, the Lisbon City Council did not recognize the decision and the measure no longer appears to be urgent on any political agenda, national or local.
This week, the Movement for a Housing Referendum collected the 5,000 signatures needed for a referendum against short-term rentals in Lisbon.
Other cities, like Bruges, in Belgium, are trying to promote “quality tourism”.
Although Barcelona uses short-term rentals as its unit of measurement, in Lisbon, the Union of Commerce and Services Associations (UACS) blames the establishment of various hotels for a problem in the city: the disappearance of street commerce.
This is not the case in cities like Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, where efforts have been made for several years to direct tourists to less crowded attractions or even limit the construction of new hotels.
Other cities, like Bruges, in Belgium, are trying to promote “quality tourism,” preferring visitors who stay in the city for several days and have purchasing power over those who stop for a few hours before returning to their cruise ships; some cities are now also limiting the number of cruise ships that can dock simultaneously.
Territorial quarters
The charms of Porto are no longer a secret; the coastal city in northwest Portugal saw a 41.8% increase in the number of available beds from 2017 to 2022. In 2022, around 4.8 million overnight stays were recorded — surpassing pre-pandemic levels (4.5 million overnight stays in 2019).
It is believed that tourist pressure is increasingly causing the closure of various historic and traditional shops. A recent example is the closure of the Casa Madureira textile shop on Rua das Carmelitas in early June. After more than 80 years in business, the elderly owner received a good offer from a Spanish investor and decided to close the shop. It follows the sad path of iconic establishments such as the Mercearia do Bolhão grocery store, which after 150 years of history, was replaced by a branch of the Spanish gift shop chain Ale-Hop.
In this context, the “Yours Truly, Porto” project was created to disperse tourist flows. It includes the analysis of international tourism sector trends, drawing inspiration from World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) recommendations for dealing with overtourism.
The city is for those who visit it, but also for those who live in it.
This new vision of the city will allow for the individualization of promotion strategies and investment attraction for each quarter, based on identity, competitiveness factors, attractiveness, and the tourism offer, responding to the needs, potentialities, and idiosyncrasies of each ‘micro-destination’ within Porto.
Porto has committed to studying its tourism and its impacts through a “diagnosis of the current tourist flows and their concentration in the city,” subsequently making a “territorial demarcation [and] definition of the identity of ‘territorial quarters'” and creating “lines of action” to activate and stimulate these zones.
The result is a new map of Porto. Emerging quarters, such as “Campanhã, Antas,” despite their potential, concentrate a “reduced number of under-explored or nonexistent tourist assets.” Places like the Estádio do Dragão or the Intermodal Terminal have been identified as points of interest in this block, whose theme was defined as: “the Porto where rural and urban intertwine, with constant new dynamics and renewal, which will be a stage for unique and distinctive spaces in the city.”
What about Lisbon?
The strategy is seen positively by Jorge Ferreira, a professor at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and a researcher in Tourism Geography. He believes that something similar could be considered for the capital city, Lisbon.
But Ferreira warns against transferring the model designed for Porto, which has a smaller population (around 237,000 people) than Lisbon — although both have “basically the same population density.” In the capital, these dynamics are also diverse, and from a more sustainable tourism perspective. Ferreira believes that the city “needs to be promoted more as a territory extending to other municipalities, including the south bank of the Tagus River, especially for the attractiveness of its beaches, gastronomy, nature, etc.,” as well as the cities of Sintra and Mafra, UNESCO Cultural Heritage.
“The city is for those who visit it, but also for those who live in it — and at the moment, there is a clash between these two,” Ferreira says.
A model for the future
Passionate about the capital, the city where he grew up, Ferreira recognizes that it is essential to “create points of attraction” and that these should leverage the best that social media can offer for promoting a city online. More than creating territorial quarters, it is necessary to create new Points of Interest.
There are several variables to consider from the start when planning a tourist flow dispersion strategy, including “mobility, the city’s policy toward innovation and creativity, and new living spaces.” Ferreira believes that tourism should be considered in a more inclusive and integrative way through “balance between those who visit, those who work, those who invest, and those who live.”
Lisbon is currently in a state of transition between “trendy tourism” and “bothersome tourism.”
It is no secret that Lisbon has changed a lot in recent years. But is there any city that hasn’t changed?
“The cultural identity and authenticity of neighborhoods are made by the people and the economies that are established and developed there, and as is quite noticeable, both aspects have changed radically,” says João Barreta, a specialist in land management and commercial urban planning. “Tourism in Lisbon is currently in a state of transition between ‘trendy tourism’ and ‘bothersome tourism.’ And typical Lisbon cultural identity and authenticity now risks being the cause of its “eclipse.”
Barreta compares the situation, especially in historic neighborhoods, as a kind of “Beauty and the Beast”: “the beauty is not exclusive to the city, nor is the monstrosity exclusive to tourism.”
The coming years will be decisive, with the certainty that it is necessary to consider tourism broadly — a constant balancing act among the many people who depend on the city in such diverse ways.
