Why has Barcelona fallen on hard times?
I'll outline a few reasons:
It is getting more and more difficult to eat well in Barcelona. Pre-pandemic, it was easy to pop into a restaurant (without reservations) and eat well for not a lot of money. Now it is a lot more of a crapshoot and you cannot totally rely on online reviews. I went back to my favorite tapas bar in Barcelona recently, Bar Celta, and the quality of the tapas was noticeably reduced despite the prices almost doubling.
In relation to the food quality crisis is the tapas bar crisis. Is becoming much more difficult to get the traditional “tapas bar” experience in Barcelona and a lot of Spain for that matter. The old favorites are selling out and moving on, the ones that are left are only catering to tourists, becoming little more than sit-down restaurants that serve fullon overpriced plates marketed as “tapas”. When I recently revisited my favorite tapas bar, Bar Celta, I noticed I was the only local customer, everyone else was a foreigner. Back in 2019, despite the bar’s location in the Barrio Gotico, there was still a 50/50 split between locals and tourists.
Crime continues to be an issue in Barcelona and crime rates are on the rise and thieves are taking advantage of the overtourism. The crime is mainly targeted at tourists not so much local constituents, so the city government is not too incentivized to tackle the problem, tourists don't vote. As long as the tourist dollars keep coming in they don't care. Many of the local politicians no longer live in the city of Barcelona itself, but rather in nearby posh towns like Sant Cugat or Sabadell, so they don't have to personally worry about security. The politicians are also not tackling the crime problem for fear of looking too "heavy handed" or "authoritative" or "fascist". For example pickpockets in Barcelona face no jail time and minimal fines, even when caught, in one case a pickpocket was caught 87 separate times yet never faced punishment.
Trash and over construction continues to be an issue in Barcelona, with streets filthy with trash and both human/animal excrement, especially in the old town. There is also a construction boom in Barcelona and half the city feels like there is construction being done on almost all the streets, for new bike lanes. Apparently, they want to make Barcelona the new Amsterdam. The problem is many people still commute to Barcelona for work from the outskirts via car, so I don't know who are using these bike lanes.
In my old neighborhood there used to be a rare sight to see a non-local, now I am hearing English, French, and German habitually. There are 90 cruises expected just in August in Barcelona. That’s roughly 270,000 extra people swamping the relatively compact Ciutat Vella (old town area) in a single month, more than double the 100k local population for the Ciutat Vella district. I am hearing less of Catalan in Barcelona. The trend of locals being pushed out by Airbnb and tourists continues. In my recent trip I mustered my courage and made a “safari” in the Barrio Gotico. Absolutely swamped with tourists going every which way, with no local life in sight, has become a giant shopping mall. Public transportation is in the area is totally full and over-taxed, overflowing with tourists.
