Overtourism: what it is, its causes and the numbers behind mass tourism

Overtourism is the condition in which the number of visitors concentrated in one place, over a given period, exceeds that place's capacity to welcome them without harming residents, the environment and the very quality of the travel experience. The term, which spread around 2017, doesn't simply describe "lots of people": it describes an imbalance. A city can receive millions of visitors and function, or a few thousand concentrated into a single weekend and collapse. The problem, almost always, isn't the how much but the where and the when.

The numbers

The numbers help frame the scale of the phenomenon. According to UN Tourism (the UN agency for tourism, formerly the UNWTO), in 2024 international tourist arrivals reached 1.4 billion, 11% more than in 2023 and almost 99% of pre-pandemic levels, with international receipts of around 1.6 trillion dollars. Italy, according to ISTAT data, recorded a new high in 2024 with 458.4 million overnight stays (+2.5%), becoming the second country in the European Union after Spain and overtaking France. Growth that is in itself good economic news: the point is how it is distributed.

The causes

The causes of overtourism are well known and reinforce one another. The first is low-cost transport: budget flights and the expansion of cruising have made it cheap to reach destinations once expensive or remote. The second is the short-let revolution: platforms like Airbnb have increased the supply of accommodation in historic centres, but at the cost of taking homes away from residents and pushing rents up. The third is temporal and spatial concentration: everyone wants the same places (the same square, the same view) in the same months, often in summer. The fourth is social media: a handful of viral images sends millions of people towards a very few spots, turning a viewpoint into a queue.

The effects

The effects become visible when tourism stops being seasonal and becomes, as many residents put it, "365 days a year". Venice is the emblematic case: in 2019 the lagoon city counted around 30 million visitors, almost fifty times its population. To curb the hit-and-run flows, in 2024 it introduced an experimental 5-euro access fee for day-trippers (195,000 tickets sold in the first 11 days), then doubled to 10 euros for last-minute bookers and extended from 29 to 54 days in 2025, with a ban on groups of more than 25 people. In Barcelona, a city that receives around 12 million visitors a year, in July 2024 some 3,000 people marched squirting water at tourists with toy pistols, chanting "tourist go home" and "one more tourist, one fewer resident". In the Canaries, over 10 million foreign visitors a year have blown the housing problem wide open, with residents denouncing the impossibility of renting where they were born. The effects, in short, are three: pressure on housing and the emptying of centres, wear and tear on heritage and public services, and a loss of the sense of place, which turns into a stage set.

How to redistribute

The answer to overtourism isn't to stop travelling, but to redistribute. It means choosing less saturated destinations, less crowded periods and slower rhythms. On this blog it's the common thread of every guide. Instead of cramming into Piazza San Marco, for example, it's worth getting to know the North-East on the water without overtourism or the other cities and villages on the water far from the crush. For Liguria, instead of the five most-photographed villages you can prefer colourful Ligurian villages but without the crush; for Spain, a less crowded Barcelona and Spain or Mediterranean Spanish cities without crowds or chaos.

The same reasoning applies to Italy's great attractions: you can dodge the queues at the Uffizi in Florence, at the Colosseum in Rome and at the Trevi Fountain, or move from the Costa Smeralda to the more authentic sea of Sardinia and from Positano to the alternatives of the Amalfi Coast. The logic holds abroad too: ancient Greece without the crowds of the Acropolis or the archaeological sites of the South instead of Pompeii. Two habits, finally, change everything: travelling in low season, when the numbers deflate, and following a few practical rules to avoid overtourism. Understanding the numbers serves precisely this purpose: not to blame those who set off, but to travel in a way that lets the place, and those who live there, keep on existing.