Summer used to mean sunburnt shoulders and gelato drips on cobblestones. These days it also means water pistols, protest banners, and city councils scrambling to write new rules before the next cruise ship docks. Across the continent, residents in some of Europe’s most photographed places have started drawing a line, not against visitors exactly, but against the sheer volume of them arriving at once.
The pushback isn’t uniform. Some cities are capping cruise arrivals, others are taxing hotel beds into the double digits, and a few are simply telling tourists, bluntly, that they’ve had enough. Here’s a look at eight places where that tension has become impossible to ignore.
Barcelona, Spain
Barcelona has become something close to the symbol of Europe’s overtourism fatigue. In June 2025, protesters marched through central Barcelona holding signs stating “Tourism is killing Barcelona” and squirting people with water pistols in tourist hotspots.[1] The frustration wasn’t performative theater. Mayor Jaume Collboni said rents had increased 68% in the past 10 years, with the cost of buying a house up 38%.[2]
City hall has responded with some of the toughest measures on the continent. Barcelona intends to phase out short-term rentals by 2028.[3] By 2026, the city had appointed its first commissioner for sustainable tourism, José Antonio Donaire, at the forefront of Barcelona’s efforts to reverse and prevent overtourism and return the city to its residents.[4] Hotel taxes have climbed sharply too, with the city nearly doubling its hotel guest tax, raising the nightly charge from roughly $5-$9 to $10-$17 per person.[5]
Venice, Italy
Venice’s problem has always been geography as much as popularity. A city built on a lagoon can only absorb so many day-trippers before the bridges and alleyways simply seize up. Venice receives approximately 30 million visitors against approximately 50,000 historic-centre residents, down from 150,000 in 1950, a nominal ratio of roughly 600 to 1.[6]
The city’s answer has been a day-tripper access fee, first introduced in 2024 and expanded since. The day-tripper access fee introduced in 2024, at 5 euros for visitors in peak periods, was extended and doubled to 10 euros in 2025.[6] Critics aren’t convinced it’s working. In Venice, opponents of the city’s day-tripper fee described the policy as a failure, arguing tourist numbers remained extremely high despite the introduction of the entry charge.[7]
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Amsterdam’s tourism backlash started earlier than most, with a 2023 campaign warning rowdy visitors to stay away. Following its 2023 campaign telling rowdy tourists to stay away, Amsterdam is now clamping down on hotels and cruise ships.[8] The city has since moved from messaging to hard limits.
The numbers involved are striking for a city center that’s still fairly compact. The Dutch capital plans to limit cruise ships in its harbor to just 100 in 2026, down from 190 currently, before banning them outright by 2035.[9] Officials expect the change to matter at scale, since the proposals predict 271,000 fewer visitors per year via river cruise and aim to cut voyages to the city by half, to just 1,150 a year by 2028.[9]
Athens, Greece
The Acropolis is a single hilltop site, which makes it uniquely vulnerable to crowd crushes. Up to 23,000 people crammed into the site on some days, 70 percent more than in 2022, raising concerns that overcrowding was damaging the ancient landmark.[10] That congestion, combined with brutal summer heat, forced the issue.
Authorities responded with a staggered ticketing system that’s still in force. At the Acropolis in Athens, a timed ticketing system has been introduced, limiting the number of visitors to 20,000 per day.[11] The booking system now extends well beyond the Acropolis itself, since in April 2024, the new booking system was also applied to over 25 other archaeological sites across the country.[12]
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Dubrovnik’s walled old town is tiny, medieval, and utterly unsuited to modern cruise-ship arrivals in the thousands. The city’s warning came early, when overtourism became such a problem that in 2016, UNESCO announced it was at risk of losing its World Heritage Site status.[12] That threat pushed local officials into action long before most of Europe caught up.
The response has reshaped daily life inside the walls. Visitor numbers coming from cruise ships are now capped at 8,000 a day, the number of souvenir stands has been cut by 80 percent, and the number of restaurant tables and chairs has been reduced by 30 percent.[12] Even so, the scale of the problem hasn’t fully eased, since Dubrovnik has emerged as the leader in Europe’s overtourism crisis, with an astonishing 600 annual cruise ship visits.[13]
Lisbon, Portugal
Lisbon rarely tops the overtourism headlines the way Barcelona or Venice does, but locals describe the same slow squeeze on housing and neighborhood life. Following years of resident protests, the city is finally seeing a shift in how it manages the pressures of overtourism, having doubled its overnight tax to €4 in January 2025.[14] Officially, the change took effect a bit earlier than that framing suggests.
The Portuguese capital officially doubled its municipal tourist tax from €2 to €4 per night per guest beginning on 1 September 2024, with the framework continuing fully into 2026.[15] Cruise passengers face their own charge too, since a separate cruise-passenger charge of €2 per disembarkation applies to people landing at the Port of Lisbon and entering the city for the day.[16] The pattern has spread beyond the capital, as Porto has followed suit, and nine municipalities in the Azores and Madeira have introduced similar tourism levies.[14]
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Mallorca’s capital has become a flashpoint in its own right, distinct from the wider Balearic protests that grab headlines each summer. Anti-tourism sentiment here is tied directly to housing costs, echoing the mainland pattern. Spain is experiencing a sustained wave of anti-overtourism demonstrations, concentrated in Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, the Canary Islands, and other heavily visited cities.[17]
Locals in Palma have been vocal about what they see as an economy built around visitors rather than residents. Their core grievance is local: rents and home prices have soared as long-term housing converts to short-term tourist lets, pricing residents out of their own cities.[17] The demonstrations, for what it’s worth, have stayed largely peaceful, described as marches, banners, street-art campaigns, and symbolic gestures.[17]
Nice and Cannes, France
The French Riviera’s overtourism story is really a cruise-ship story. Massive vessels docking in small ports overwhelm narrow old towns built centuries before anyone imagined ships carrying thousands of day-trippers at once. In Southern France, Nice and Cannes have begun limiting cruise ship passengers coming into the towns starting in summer 2026.[3]
Cannes in particular has restructured how its port handles arrivals. Cannes moved to limit cruise crowd surges by setting a daily cap on disembarking passengers and restricting the largest ships, with local leaders citing congestion and air quality concerns tied to peak arrivals in the old port area.[18] The shift favors smaller vessels over the floating cities that once dominated the harbor, with operators required to align with new thresholds for tender boat and bus flow.[18]
Final Thoughts
None of these cities are actually trying to shut their doors. Tourism still funds enormous parts of the Spanish, Italian, French, and Greek economies, and arrival numbers keep climbing year after year. What’s changing is the terms of the deal: residents want growth that’s managed, taxed, and spread out rather than dumped entirely on a handful of famous streets and squares.
Whether the current wave of caps, fees, and rental bans actually thins the crowds is still an open question. City halls are watching the data as closely as protesters are watching the calendar. For travelers, the practical takeaway is simple enough: book ahead, expect to pay a bit more, and maybe consider the quieter town twenty minutes down the coast instead of the one everyone’s already seen a thousand times on a screen.
