The hosts in Barcelona were operating in a kind of “gray market” in those early years of growth: It wasn’t explicitly legal, nor was it clearly forbidden.īut as tourist numbers grew, so, too, did the sense among many in Barcelona that the city was nearing its capacity for visitors. When Airbnb arrived in 2009, Barcelona had no specific regulations governing private rentals to tourists, but interest in the service was evident: By the middle of 2016, there were some 20,000 listings of both private rooms and entire apartments in Airbnb’s Barcelona section, according to data from Inside Airbnb, which tracks listings in cities around the world. And that’s not even counting the more than three million cruise ship passengers who passed through the city’s port that year. By 2019, Barcelona - a city of about 1.6 million - registered over 21.3 million overnight stays, more than double the figure from 2005. A new “destination” was born.Īttracted by the city’s museums, restaurants, architecture and Mediterranean coastline, tourists arrived from across Europe and around the world.

But that changed after the city hosted the Summer Olympics in 1992: An enormous public investment in beautifying the city coincided with a prime spot on the global stage. Forty years ago, Barcelona wasn’t high on most tourists’ lists of must-see cities in Europe.

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