Locals in ‘Europe’s most beautiful town’ threaten ‘guerilla action’ over ‘hell’

Locals living in one of Europe’s most beautiful towns have threatened guerilla action over hell caused by too many tourists.

Sintra was once dubbed a “glorious Eden” and “the most delightful [town] in Europe” by legendary poet Lord Byron. But now, it is being overrun with thousands of tourists who want to bask in its beauty.

Residents have taken matters into their own hands, with one protest group saying that “guerilla action is needed” over traffic chaos”.

Sintra is the latest in a long line of towns, cities, and villages across Europe that are beginning to push back against the post-pandemic wave of tourists flooding onto the continent.

Speaking to the Times about one of the biggest problems in the city, traffic, British local Sarah Hemmings said the situation was now so bad that journeys weren’t just being doubled in length, but quintupled.  

She said: “It’s very frightening thinking…if there was a fire or emergency and an ambulance needed to get through. It takes me two to three hours to do a 20-minute round trip to the nearest shop.”

Furthermore, a protest group has complained that Sintra has been turned into a “congested amusement park” and that leading it “without inhabitants” was “not the path to quality tourism”.

Whilst the likes of Sintra in Portugal and Palma in Spain are not aggravated by the presence of tourists, it is their sheer number and the impact on the local economy that local people have a problem with.

As a result, there is a growing drive towards finding a compromise between tourists benefiting local economies and locals not being priced out of the communities they grew up in.

One of the ways locals are trying to highlight their plight is through mass protests such as those in Palma, Majorca which has been one of the hubs of overtourism discontent in Europe.

Speaking to the Majorca Daily Bulletin, representative of one of the anti-protest groups Margalida Ramis said: “The truth is that we no longer need to campaign to raise people’s awareness, but rather to take immediate and long-term measures.”

She said however that there was “zero confidence” in negotiations and discussions on ways to improve the situation and that they could “already see in which way it is heading”.

Margalida added that overtourism is not just affecting locals, but tourists too who are now not coming because of the phenomenon.

She explained: “Many people are already stopping coming when they see how saturated the island is. It is not we who are destroying tourism, it is they themselves.”

The hope is that by changing the discourse on overtourism a solution can be found that enables an location’s economy to thrive in tourists rather than drown in them.