As I huddled beneath a leaky tent on the Thursday night of Primavera Sound, biblical rain thundering down and winds of fury slicing through the crowd, I couldn’t help but wonder: are these the karmic pains of a city with a tourism problem, one this very festival is exacerbating? The timing feels significant. This month, Pope Leo XIV officially inaugurated the final tower of the Sagrada Família, the iconic basilica that has been partly wrapped in scaffolding since the early 2000s. Now that the focal point no longer resembles a building site, will the tourists multiply even further? And is there a way to visit Barcelona, or indeed any city, for big ticket events that prioritise visitors over locals?
The Scale of Overtourism in Barcelona
According to latest figures, Barcelona received over 16 million tourists in 2025, roughly ten times its resident population, making it one of the most visited cities in Europe. Locals have not been quiet about it. The past few years have seen residents take to the streets with water guns, soaking tourists in protest, while graffiti reading ‘tourists go home’ has become almost as iconic as the architecture. These concerns do not appear to trouble the Spanish government much. When asked about the record-breaking 97 million visitors to Spain in 2025, Tourism Minister Jordi Hereu responded: ‘This is a collective success by the whole country that perfectly demonstrates Spain’s enormous attractivity, because Spain is a country that seduces the world.’
With the Sagrada Família now fully unveiled and likely to pull in a new wave of pilgrims, the pressure isn’t going anywhere. And then there is Primavera. What started in 2001 as a modest showcase for independent music in a city that was still finding its post-Olympic identity has grown into one of the most coveted tickets on the festival circuit. It has always had an edge of cool that other European festivals struggle to manufacture, and over the past two decades it has become a cultural institution, drawing not just music fans but the kind of crowd that treats the lineup as a personality test. Nearly 300,000 of them descended on Barcelona just last week (myself included).
Slow Travel as a Solution
And yet, there I was. I arrived two days before the festival to wander around and track down the bakeries I had been obsessing over on Instagram. As it turns out, this is sort of a slow travel tip in itself. Or so Mathew Prior, CEO of TrustedHousesitters, says: ‘The ones who get the most out of those trips aren’t the ones rushing in and out of a hotel. They’re the ones who stay long enough to actually live somewhere.’ Two days is not exactly a full ‘living’ immersion, and I was staying in a hotel (Citadines Las Ramblas) rather than a hammock in someone’s spare room. But that extra time did let me experience Barcelona beyond the wristband, which is, I’d argue, the whole point.
Because I had Primavera as my main event, the pressure to tick off the tourist attractions simply didn’t exist. There was no scramble for the Sagrada Família, no queuing outside the Picasso Museum. Instead, I spent two hours in a cafeteria down a side street and tried on jewellery in TwoJeys for considerably longer than was necessary. As Meredith, slow travel writer at Two Packs and a Pup, puts it: ‘Instead of treating travel like a checklist, slowing down allows you to really know a city.’ I felt like I absorbed the Catalonian vibe in a more authentic way than if I’d have done an open top bus tour, and this is precisely what responsible event travel looks like in practice.
The Shift from Event-as-Destination to Event-as-Anchor
Nohl Martin, founder of ChooseWellTravel, describes a shift he’s seeing in real time, from ‘event-as-destination to event-as-anchor’. ‘People used to fly in for the race, the match, the festival, and fly out. Now they’re treating the event as the reason the trip exists, but building real time in the place around it,’ he says. That reframe is everything. And the numbers back it up. New research from Sojern found that intra-European flight bookings are up 37% year-on-year, with Spain up 28%, and Italy and Portugal each up 24%. Major events supercharge that movement further, with British travellers currently leading the world in FIFA World Cup bookings. We account for 19.4% of all international flight bookings into host cities, more than any other nation.
The question of whether that travel is done responsibly is one worth sitting with. A friend of mine recently bought tickets to Olivia Dean in Amsterdam after missing out in London. Rather than treating it as a quick in-and-out, she turned it into a longer trip, one of her main holidays of the year. She came home having actually seen Amsterdam. And that is how event travel is done.
Local Perspectives and Practical Tips
Inside Primavera, I spoke to Barcelona local Clara, who articulated the tension better than I could. ‘I understand why people want to come,’ she told me, ‘but if you’re here, be aware that there are people who live here and be respectful.’ Clara is right, and the good news is that responsible travel rarely demands grand gestures. It lives in the small ones: keeping the noise down, not wandering shirtless three streets back from the beach, rounding your bill up to leave a tip, and saying hola instead of hello.
Treating the place like somewhere people actually live, because it is. So, to answer the question: yes, there is a responsible way to travel to events. Stay a little longer, go a little slower and while you’re at it, try the bakery down the alleyway. Adéu.
Essential Travel Information
Vueling flies direct to Barcelona from London from £70 return. Citadines Las Ramblas has double rooms from £115 per night. Prices may vary during peak times.
