There’s a particular kind of tension building in some of the world’s most photographed places right now, and it has little to do with the weather or the exchange rate. It shows up in graffiti on shuttered storefronts, in city council meetings that run late into the night, and in the occasional water pistol aimed at a stranger dragging a suitcase. Across several countries, the relationship between residents and the visitors who once seemed like a purely welcome source of income has grown noticeably strained, and 2025 turned out to be the year that strain became impossible to ignore.
What follows isn’t a list of places to avoid. It’s a look at where the friction is sharpest, why it developed, and what local governments are actually doing about it heading into 2026.
Spain
Spain has become the clearest example of what happens when tourism numbers keep climbing while housing supply doesn’t. The country’s 48 million residents welcomed a record 94 million international visitors in 2024, and the mismatch between those two figures has fueled a housing crisis that residents blame squarely on short-term rentals. In June 2025, protesters in Barcelona marched with homemade signs and signs saying “One more tourist, one less resident”, while others in the city stuck stickers reading “Citizen Self-Defense” and “Tourist Go Home” on hotel and hostel doors. One Barcelona resident told reporters his rent has risen over 30% as more apartments in his neighborhood are rented to tourists for short-term stays.
The anger hasn’t stayed confined to the Catalan capital. The largest protest occurred in Majorca where approximately 5,000 people took to the streets in the island’s capital city of Palma, with hundreds more protesting in Barcelona and Granada. Conditions on the ground have gotten severe enough that over 1,000 people were living in cars in Mallorca in 2024 due to housing shortages. In response, Spain’s government ordered Airbnb to remove almost 66,000 holiday rentals from the platform that it said had violated local rules, and Barcelona’s town hall stunned the industry by announcing the elimination of all 10,000 short-term rental licenses in the city by 2028.
Italy
Italy’s frustration centers less on rent and more on the sheer physical weight of visitors crowding fragile, centuries-old spaces. In Genoa, residents staged an unusually theatrical protest, parading a cardboard ocean liner through the city’s narrow alleyways to protest against its seasonal flooding by cruise goers. Venice has kept its experimental day-tripper fee running since it was first introduced, and cities further inland have followed with their own restrictions rather than waiting for the problem to worsen.
Florence has moved to limit outdoor dining that had begun colonizing its historic squares, while ski regions in the Dolomites have scaled back pass availability to manage crowding on the slopes. Venice is keeping its summer tourist entry tax, introduced in 2024, reducing outdoor dining in Florence, and reducing its ski passes in the Dolomites. These aren’t dramatic bans so much as a steady tightening, the kind of incremental policy shift that suggests officials expect the pressure to keep building rather than ease off on its own.
Japan
Japan’s tourism boom has been driven largely by a weak yen, and the numbers involved are staggering by historical standards. About 42.7 million tourists flocked to Japan in 2025, an all-time high, topping 2024’s record of nearly 37 million. The strain shows up most visibly in Kyoto, where a recent city survey found the top complaint among citizens was the overcrowding of city buses, which locals rely on for commuting and schooling. One resident summed it up plainly, noting that tourists fill up buses early in the morning, and students can’t get to school on time.
The response has gone beyond surveys. In early 2026, officials in Fujiyoshida canceled a popular cherry blossom festival near Mount Fuji because the weeks-long event attracting around 200,000 people threatened the quiet lives of local residents. Kyoto is also raising its accommodation tax sharply starting in March 2026, and the national government is lifting its international departure tax from a lower rate to ¥3,000 from July 1, 2026. Parts of Gion, the historic geisha district, have already been closed to tourists after complaints about visitors harassing performers for photos.
Mexico
Mexico’s frustration has a distinctly modern flavor, tied less to sightseeing crowds and more to remote workers and long-term expats reshaping entire neighborhoods. Mexico City saw sometimes violent eruptions against overtourism throughout the summer of 2025, with the first protest beginning on July 4, American Independence Day. Demonstrators targeted what they saw as an endless arrival of foreigners into trendy areas like Roma Norte and Condesa, neighborhoods that had quietly transformed over a few short years.
The core complaint was economic displacement, as protests formed to push back against the perceived endless influx of Americans and Europeans into trendy neighborhoods that were forcing out long-term residents because of exorbitant rent hikes and a lack of regulation over holiday lettings. But the resentment extends into smaller cultural details too, including frustration over an increase in restaurant menus in English, or hot sauces at taco stands becoming milder to cater to more sensitive foreign palates. It’s a reminder that overtourism friction isn’t always about crowded landmarks. Sometimes it’s about a neighborhood feeling like it no longer belongs to the people who built it.
Indonesia
Bali has moved from informal grumbling to a genuinely formalized policy response, one of the clearest examples of a destination trying to manage its own popularity. Since February 2024, a 150,000 rupiah, roughly $15, levy has been imposed on foreign tourists, with funds designated for protecting the island’s culture and environment. Officials have since tightened enforcement, and an official April 2025 notice said the levy voucher would become a requirement for boarding-pass issuance, closing the loophole that let earlier visitors simply skip paying.
Local officials have floated far more aggressive ideas too. One regional lawmaker described wanting to envision the island “selecting” tourists just like Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom that caps annual arrivals and charges steep daily fees. Bali has also tried, with mixed success, to ban tourist motorbike rentals and restrict access to its sacred mountains following complaints about reckless and disrespectful behavior. The island recorded its share of Indonesia’s approximately 15.39 million international visitors in 2025, and authorities are now pushing a broader shift toward what they call regenerative tourism rather than simply chasing higher arrival numbers.
Greece
Greece’s islands face a very specific version of overtourism, one dictated almost entirely by cruise ship schedules. Mykonos, an island with only about ten thousand permanent residents, absorbed a staggering 768 cruise arrivals in 2024, bringing 1.29 million passengers to an island with only 10,000 permanent residents. Santorini’s famous cliffside villages face similar pressure during peak midday hours when several ships dock simultaneously.
Athens has responded with structural limits rather than just fees, setting a daily visitor cap of 20,000 people for the Acropolis, enforced through staggered ticket times. Santorini now caps cruise arrivals as well, with a daily cap of 8,000 visitors established to prevent the infrastructure from collapsing under the midday rush, alongside a new cruise passenger levy of twenty euros during peak summer months. A separate Climate Resilience Tax, ranging up to fifteen euros per night at five-star hotels, adds another funding stream aimed squarely at infrastructure strained by the annual influx.
Netherlands
Amsterdam’s problem has always had a specific flavor: it isn’t just crowding, it’s a certain kind of rowdy visitor drawn by the city’s reputation for permissiveness. The city launched what became known as its “Stay Away” campaign, specifically targeting visitors coming for “nuisance tourism,” such as rowdy stag parties. It’s a rare example of a destination trying to actively discourage a certain type of tourist rather than simply managing overall numbers.
Beyond messaging, the policy changes have been concrete. Amsterdam already charges one of Europe’s highest tourist taxes, levying 12.5% on accommodation costs, and has gone further by banning buses over seven and a half tons from the city center and raising cruise passenger taxes. The city has also frozen new hotel and bed-and-breakfast permits in its most crowded districts and, according to reporting on 2026 policy, banned new tourist shops in the center and is limiting the number of river cruises to prioritize the quality of life for its 800,000 residents.
Portugal
Lisbon’s residents joined the wave of coordinated southern European protests in June 2025, a moment that made clear the frustration wasn’t confined to Spain alone. Demonstrators gathered in the Portuguese capital where demonstrators banged pots and shouted slogans during a protest against mass tourism in Lisbon. The timing wasn’t accidental. Organizers across several countries had deliberately synchronized their marches, treating overtourism as a shared regional crisis rather than an isolated local complaint.
The grievances in Lisbon echo those heard elsewhere on the continent, namely that the target of the protests are policy makers who have long prioritized the positive financial impacts of tourism over the needs of residents. Housing costs in central Lisbon have climbed sharply as short-term rental platforms expanded through neighborhoods once dominated by long-term leases. While Portugal hasn’t yet introduced restrictions as sweeping as Barcelona’s rental phase-out, pressure from residents and housing advocates has kept the issue firmly on the national political agenda heading into 2026.
Croatia
Dubrovnik’s old town has become something of a cautionary tale for what happens when a single television show turns a small walled city into a global pilgrimage site. Fans of a certain fantasy series have swarmed its medieval walls so aggressively the city had to install crowd-counting cameras just to monitor how many people were packed inside at once. That kind of monitoring wasn’t a novelty measure. It reflected a genuine capacity problem in streets never built for modern crowd volumes.
The city had already taken firmer steps years earlier, capping cruise ship arrivals even though its port infrastructure could technically handle more. Beyond Dubrovnik itself, the pressure has spread along Croatia’s entire Adriatic coastline, where tourism revenue has increasingly collided with local housing needs. One recent overview of overtourism hotspots put it simply, noting that Croatia’s crunch point is the coast, where tourism money has collided hard with housing, a dynamic that mirrors what’s playing out in Spain and Portugal but on a smaller, more concentrated coastal scale.
Final Thoughts
None of these nine countries are turning their backs on tourism itself. Tourism remains a massive economic engine in every one of them, and none of the measures described here amount to closing the doors. What’s changed is the willingness of residents to say, loudly and sometimes creatively, that unmanaged growth has a real cost to the people who live somewhere year-round rather than for a week in July.
Heading into the rest of 2026, expect more of the same pattern: taxes rising, caps tightening, and local patience continuing to shape how these places choose to welcome the world.
