Who is afraid of mass tourism? Persistence and renewal of anti-tourism rhetoric in Lisbon

• Autor(a) principal: Vaz, Alexandre
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Anais Brasileiros de Estudos Turísticos
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufjf.br/index.php/abet/article/view/41140
• topic: Tourism; Conflict; Lisbon; Graffiti; Turismo; Conflicto; Lisboa; Graffiti; Turismo; Conflito; Lisboa; Grafiti

On a global scale tourism has grown rapidly in the last decades and in Lisbon this trend was felt especially after the financial crisis of 2011 and the subsequent austerity policies and incentive to foreign investment. This dynamic produced substantive changes in the uses of urban space that were at the origin of disputes and conflicts. Even though the concept of tourismphobia is relatively recent, the critical, and often moralistic, view of leisure travel is as old as the Grand Tour itself. In this article, we start from the intersection of literary sources, official and political discourse, interviews, and graffiti to analyze the main arguments invoked against tourism and the contradictions they contain We conclude that, despite the criticism being anchored in the broader issue of rejecting capitalist models, in practice, its protagonists show contradictory signs of defending their privilege to inhabit a less contested city or to visit tourist destinations without them being overcrowded by their peers. Tourism thus appears to be a good example of the tensions generated by advanced capitalism.