Overcrowded Cities: Top Five

Here are five of Europe’s most overcrowded cities, resulting from overtourism, and what they’re doing to alleviate the problem:

1. Venice, Italy

Home to about fifty thousand residents, Venice is one of the most-visited cities in the world, with about thirty million visitors per year. Overtourism, as well as climate change, is having such a negative impact on its environment that the United Nations has considered including it on the World Heritage in Danger list. Venice already has an overnight tax for visitors based on the number of nights they stay and the number of stars their accommodation has. This year, it introduced a tax of €5 for daytime visitors, to be imposed on its busiest days.

2. Barcelona, Spain

In 2019, Barcelona, a city of 1.6 million residents, had over twenty million visitors, and now tourists are returning there en masse. The city already has an overnight tax for visitors, a limit on its number of hotel beds, and a moratorium on the construction of new hotels. Last October, it introduced a ban on cruise ships docking near its city centre and a reduction in the number of cruise ships at its other ports. This is in part because of pollution: one study found that one cruise ship can produce the same levels of nitrogen oxide a day as thirty thousand trucks or 370,000 cars. 

3. Amsterdam, Netherlands

Amsterdam has about a million residents — and about a million tourists visit every month. The city has a liberal reputation, but its mayor, Femke Halsema, now wants to control tourist numbers and discourage bad behaviour by banning sex work and marijuana from the city centre and relocating its red-light district elsewhere. The city has also decided to ban cruise ships from its main port, limiting the number of cruise passengers flooding the city. They came in such numbers that local politician Ilana Rooderkerk had compared them to a “plague of locusts.”

4. Bruges, Belgium

As Dirk De fauw, mayor of Bruges, put it “We have to control the influx more if we don’t want it to become a complete Disneyland here.” This beautiful Belgian city has a population of about 120,000, but gets an astonishing eight million visitors a year. In response to overtourism, the city has stopped promoting day trips, favouring long-term visitors instead, and reduced the number of cruise ships docking at its port from five to two a day.

5. Dubrovnik, Croatia

Last year, the vacation rental agency Holidu named Dubrovnik the most overcrowded tourism destination in Europe — mainly thanks to the phenomenal success of the TV series Game of Thrones. The walled city, which has a population of about forty thousand, has become famous as one of the series’ filming locations and now receives over 1.5 million visitors a year. To alleviate the negative impact of tourism, it has introduced a Respect the City campaign and been pressed to take other measures, including banning climbing on monuments or drinking alcohol near protected public spaces.