- The mayor of Barcelona is looking to immediately increase the cruise passenger tourist tax.
- This would increase the price from €4 ($6.54) to €8 ($13.07).
- But cruise tourism only equates to one-third of the city’s overall tourism figures.
As the European summer cruise season is about to commence, the mayor of Barcelona is pushing to double the city’s tourist tax on cruise passengers who make short stops in the city.
Jaume Collboni said his proposal would immediately increase the tax for passengers docking overnight by 100 per cent. This would increase the price from €4 ($6.54) to €8 ($13.07) per night to curb overtourism.
While cruise tourism equates to around 4 to 5 per cent of the overall tourism figures, they are the most visible when they come ashore.
The city had approved plans in July 2025 to gradually raise the tax over the next four years, but the mayor now wants to fast-track the increase.
“In the coming months, we will raise the tourist tax … so that it comes into force in the next few months and not in four years as we had agreed,” Collboni said, according to Fox News.
“I want to discourage the arrival of cruise passengers,” he added, also saying that he wants to eliminate Barcelona as a stopover cruise destination, rather than a place to embark and disembark.
Barcelona, Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and Venice in Italy have been among the most vocal European cities against cruise tourism.
“Tourism must serve the city, not the other way around,” Collboni said.
“What we do not want is mass tourism — and that is why we will eliminate tourist apartments in 2028,” he explained.
“We want quality tourism,” he added, also noting, “We are interested in business visitors.”
In 2024, Barcelona’s city council members approved scaling back the city’s cruise infrastructure by cutting the number of terminals from seven to five with the goal of limiting passenger volumes.
In 2024, locals took to the streets, unfairly squirting tourists dining on the popular historic street of Las Ramblas with water pistols.
Demonstrators marched through popular areas like Barcelona’s Las Ramblas over the weekend, chanting, “Tourists go home”. Some carried signs with slogans like “Barcelona is not for sale”.
The protests come after similar events took place on the Canary Islands and Palma de Mallorca when around 10,000 Mallorca residents took to the streets to protest against cruise tourism.
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