The Tourist Conquest

I. The Conquerors Arrive Daily

No general gave the order. No flag was raised. No treaty was signed dispossessing a population of its home. And yet the result in Lisbon, in Athens, in Barcelona, in Venice, in Dubrovnik is the same as after many a classical conquest: the original population leaves the centre. The infrastructure no longer serves their needs. The language spoken in the streets is foreign. The economy produces for visitors, not for residents.

The conquerors arrive daily — and depart daily. None of them intends a conquest. They want a pleasant holiday, an affordable apartment for a week, the authentic experience of a foreign city. They are friendly, willing to spend, mostly respectful. And they destroy, nonetheless, what they are looking for — because the sum of their individually harmless decisions generates a structural violence that no individual is responsible for and no individual can undo.

This is the tourist conquest. A takeover without perpetrators — but with victims.

II. The Mechanics of Displacement

The mechanics are simple to describe. Tourists pay more for an apartment per night than locals pay per month. This price difference is the engine. Those who own an apartment have a strong incentive not to rent it as housing but to let it — not to a family that lives there, but to tourists who change daily. Platforms like Airbnb have industrialized this arbitrage: they made the market for short-term rental globally accessible and thereby systematically increased the pressure on the long-term housing market.

In Lisbon, rents rose by more than 60 percent between 2012 and 2022. In Barcelona, tens of thousands of residents had to move away from the city centre — not because they wanted to leave the city, but because they could no longer afford the rents. In Venice the resident population has fallen in fifty years from 175,000 to under 50,000. The city still exists — as a museum, as a backdrop, as an experience. But it no longer lives. The people who would have spent their lives here are gone.

The state collects tourist tax and calls it economic growth. The metrics add up: more visitors, more turnover, more tax revenue. What the metrics do not capture: the loss of social fabric, of neighbourhood, of what makes a city a place where people want to live — not only visit.

III. The Backdrop Consumes the Original

There is an irony at the heart of mass tourism that is rarely named: it destroys exactly what it seeks.

The tourist comes for the authenticity — the old alleyways, the local cuisine, the lively neighbourhood, the feeling of experiencing a real place rather than a tourist zone. But the sum of all tourists seeking this authenticity generates pressure that destroys the authenticity. The local shops give way to souvenir stores. The restaurants that cooked for residents are replaced by establishments staging an experience for tourists. The neighbours who brought life to the street have moved away.

What remains is the backdrop. The facades are still there, the alleys, the churches, the squares. But the life behind them has moved out. What the tourist experiences as authentic is a likeness — a reconstruction of the original for consumption. The original is gone. It was destroyed by its own success.

Venice is the purest example. The city is of extraordinary beauty — and completely hollowed out. On peak days more day visitors arrive than there are residents. The city's infrastructure is oriented toward these visitors: bridges leading to tourist routes, supermarkets stocked for tourists, prices calculated for tourists. The residents who remain live in a city that does not function for them — they live in the background of a backdrop built for others.

IV. The Political Economy of Tourism

Why do states allow this? The answer is political-economic and not flattering.

Tourism generates visible metrics. Visitor numbers, turnover, tax revenues — all measurable, all reportable, all politically usable. The costs of tourism — displacement, loss of housing, destruction of social structures — are diffuse, long-term, hard to measure and politically hard to attribute. The gains from tourism go to hotel chains, platforms, property owners — actors with political lobbying power. The costs are borne by the displaced, the low-income, the long-term tenants — actors without comparable lobbying power.

This is the standard structure of modern redistribution: profits private, costs socialized. The difference from the classic industrial case is that the costs here do not become visible as environmental pollution but are described as urban development. Gentrification sounds like improvement. Displacement sounds like the market. Only those who ask for whom and at whose expense recognize the structure.

Portugal and Greece are particularly instructive cases because both countries used tourism as an exit from the debt crisis — explicitly, as a policy programme. After Troika austerity, tourism remained one of the few growth sectors. Dependency became strategy. And with the strategy came the loss of control: those who rely on tourism as their main economy hand over sovereignty over their own urban development, their own housing market, their own cultural substance to external actors — to platforms, to investors, to the global flow of holiday decisions that no parliament can regulate.

V. Structural Colonization without Colonizers

The term colonization is strong — and it is meant precisely here, not rhetorically.

Classical colonization had three features: the extraction of resources, the restructuring of the local economy to serve the needs of the centre, and the displacement of the local population from their own space. The tourist takeover has all three features — only without an imperial centre, without a political decision, without an identifiable perpetrator.

The resource is the city itself — its history, its beauty, its cultural substance. It is extracted as experience, sold as product, consumed and left behind. The local economy is restructured to serve the needs of visitors: gastronomy, entertainment, accommodation displace production, education, healthcare as economic priorities. The local population is displaced from their space — not by force, but by prices.

The result is structurally the same. The process is more diffuse, the responsibility less clear, the resistance harder to organize — because there is no opponent against whom one could demonstrate. One cannot demonstrate against tourists. One cannot demonstrate against Airbnb and thereby change the housing market. One cannot demonstrate against one's own government, which promoted tourism — because the government produced growth that the metrics confirm.

Barcelona tried. Ada Colau, mayor from 2015 to 2023, introduced limits on Airbnb licences, halted new hotel projects in the centre, attempted to protect the housing market against tourist use. The result was limited — because the structures generating the pressure are global and exceed the reach of municipal regulation. The pressure returned as soon as the political will weakened.

VI. What Home Means — and What It Costs

Behind the structural analysis lies a simple human question: what does it mean when people must leave the place where they were born, where their family lives, where their memories are — not because of war, not because of persecution, but because the rent has risen?

This is a form of uprooting that is barely named as such in political discourse. Uprooting through war generates empathy. Uprooting through rent generates advice: move further out, commute, save. As if attachment to a place were a sentimental weakness rather than a basic human need.

The question of who a city belongs to is not a question of ownership. It is a political question — a question about whether the people who inhabit a place and make it inhabitable have the right to stay. Whether the city exists for its residents or for its visitors. Whether housing is a basic good or an investment asset.

The tourist conquest answers this question silently: the city belongs to the capital that manages it. The residents are tenants on borrowed time — until the price is right to replace them. That is not a conspiracy. It is the logic of an unregulated market applied to a good for which people have no alternative: the place where their life is.

The Conquista of the twenty-first century
needs no soldiers.
It needs only platforms, prices
and states that measure growth
and call displacement urban development. — beyond-decay.org