I see the people of Barcelona are protesting about tourism and ex-pats seeking the sun:
One of the things we noticed driving round France in 2021 was how crowded many of the popular areas had become, and how others were frantically building more houses. Living in a UK village with a vast estate 5km up the road, our traffic levels have changed enormously in the last 10 years. It makes me wonder if we shouldn’t be looking for houses in depopulated areas, rather than trying to crowd into once desirable spaces.
Hope that’s clear - writing on the phone is clumsy.
I grew up in a small town in Lancashire surrounded by open countryside. I could walk for miles from our front door without seeing signs of habitation. It all changed from the late 70’s and now the population has increased by more than 500% and most of that open countryside surrounding the town has disappeared under a tsunami of housing estates. There are a few amusing ironies. The extensive slag heaps that we used to play on as kids, that are too large and contaminated for it to be worth reclaiming for more houses, have been landscaped and are now a ‘country park’.
When I was an undergraduate it was a given that, if you had a ground-floor room, there would be tourists taking photographs of you through the window, bizarre. I can understand taking pictures of beautiful buildings but quite apart from privacy etc issues, student rooms are better not looked at I think.
