“Santiago is like an experiment in capitalism run amok that someone decided to put inside an old medieval city.”
Picture this: It’s morning in a quiet café on a cobblestone street; the outdoor tables are occupied by pigeons and old men reading the newspaper. The only noise is the chirping of birds and church bells. Then, you hear it, coming up the street.
Click click. Click click. A pair of trekking poles and the hiker attached to them comes around the corner. The hiker trudges past, bound for the cathedral whose bells sound in the distance. It’s the first trickle in a flood of visitors that will pour into Santiago de Compostela on any given day, finishing their journey across northern Spain on the Camino de Santiago, or the Way of Saint James.
This ancient pilgrimage route began in the 9th century when the remains of James the Apostle were discovered in the city named after him today. The Church built a cathedral on top of the saint’s tomb and began to receive a non-stop flow of pilgrims over the next thousand-plus years. But today, things are a bit different.
Santiago receives over 400,000 pilgrims each year (not to mention the non-Camino de Santiago tourists), which keeps growing. In the high season, there are 1.5 tourists per every local, or Compostelano—an even higher number than in other tourist hotspots like Barcelona or Palma de Mallorca. They all have to go somewhere, which poses a problem in a city with fewer than 100,000 residents. Crowded streets and the relentless noise echoing off the stone walls of Santiago’s old quarter have become a daily reality.
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Manuel Blanco is a lifelong Compostelano who is speaking out against what he and others see as an unsustainable tourism model driven by a disregard for residents.
“Santiago is like an experiment in capitalism run amok that someone decided to put inside an old medieval city,” he says. “The prices of houses have skyrocketed because people buy apartments and make them into Airbnb for tourists. No one can afford to live in Santiago anymore.”
According to the city council, at the end of 2022, there were around 900 registered tourist apartments in Santiago. The platform AirDNA, which provides short-term rental analytics, showed 908 ads for different homes on the Airbnb and Vrbo platforms alone. Blanco says by his estimation, about two-thirds of the apartments in Santiago’s old quarter are used as temporary tourist housing.
He fears that tourists are pushing out the people who have always kept Santiago afloat in the off-season. Residents in the Old Quarter have been driven away by spiking housing costs and a lack of basic necessities. Shops that once served the city’s year-round residents have been replaced with stores selling souvenirs. Santiago is also a university town, home to thousands of students, professors, and university staff. Blanco says that this part of the city is in danger of disappearing, too.
“The number of students who enroll in the University of Santiago de Compostela has gone from 50,000 to 15,000,” he says. “And why? Because the students can’t find anywhere affordable to live anymore. It’s all tourists.”
For some, there’s no difference between tourists and pilgrims. These are not-so-affectionately called turigrinos—a portmanteau of the words for tourist and pilgrim in Spanish. Others defend the pilgrims’ right to practice a legitimate devotion by walking the Camino. But every Compostelano agrees that there are some things you shouldn’t do, like pitch a tent in front of the cathedral. Stunts like these add to a current of discontent that’s been building over time and which finally came to a head in 2022.
It was a perfect storm combining a holy year for Santiago, when devout pilgrims receive a plenary indulgence for completing the Camino; the expiration of most of Spain’s Covid-19 restrictions; and the celebration of the European Youth Pilgrimage, an event that saw Catholic young people from all over Europe converge on Santiago.
“From singing loudly at all hours of the day and night to taking things from mailboxes and banging on doors with canes and walking sticks, the neighbors have had enough.”
The droves of pilgrims who descended on Santiago appear to have had a few bad apples among them. In an article published this summer in La Voz de Galicia, residents of the Rúa San Pedro—the street where pilgrims finally enter Santiago—gave a picture of bad behavior. From singing loudly at all hours of the day and night to taking things from mailboxes and banging on doors with canes and walking sticks, the neighbors have had enough.
“The euphoria of the pilgrims upon reaching the final stretch shouldn’t interfere with our rhythms of life. Shouting and singing can disturb our rest,” said Mon Vilar, president of the neighborhood association A Xuntanza, speaking to La Voz de Galicia.
“What the turigrinos are doing is based on a lack of respect for their surroundings,” says Blanco. “When you go to someone’s house, you should be respectful of where you are. In your own house you can do whatever but it’s another thing if I go to someone’s house and the authorities and the tour companies tell me that I can do what I please, like graffiti the cathedral or swim in a fountain that’s a World Heritage Site.”
Fed up with the disregard for his city, Blanco, a local artist, created an Instagram account to publicly document what he and many others see as bad behavior from tourists. @compostelaresiste is full of indignant comments and tags of local politicians, who—so far—have not directly responded. But after years of complaints and a change in city administration, the Santiago city government released a “Code of Good Practices” aimed at educating pilgrims and tourists on what not to do.
“The basic objective is to raise awareness about the heritage of our city and about the importance of taking care of it, respecting both public spaces and buildings as well as daily life itself and the rest of the neighborhood,” said the councilor for Tourism, Míriam Louzao, speaking to Nós Diario.
Louzao told the newspaper that the initiative aims for “a quality, sustainable, conscious, responsible tourism that is an economic pillar of the city while allowing a harmonious relationship with the needs of the population.” Despite these steps, Santiago’s future remains uncertain. Neither the city nor the Galician government has taken steps to limit the number of tourists coming to Santiago or crack down on illegal Airbnbs.
“What’s happening here is a political failure, by politicians of every party, based on a tourism plan written in 1993 and never updated,” says Blanco. “The only important thing then was the number of tourists, nothing more. And we’re still dealing with that today. Of course, everyone has the right to be a tourist, and people even have the right to make money from tourism. But not at any price. And not just any way they want.”
Tourist behaviour is one thing and can be dealt with adequate fines as well as number/capacity limits - check what Venice is doing!
However the proliferation of tourist accommodation and encroachment of this business on the availability of living quarters for local population (and tax contributors) is an issue to be handled by the city administration. This issue becomes a major problem for many places in the world where too many and too cheap licences have been issued and now allow to result in 1,5 visitors per local inhabitant and where functioning old town morphs to a giant souvenir mall... Just check the medieval walled city of Carcassonne in France!