The meteoric rise of tourism in Barcelona dates back to when the Catalan city hosted the Olympic Games in 1992, according to Ko Koens, professor of New Urban Tourism at Rotterdam’s Inholland University of Applied Sciences.
“The city decided to open up,” says Koens, who authored a report into overtourism for UNWTO. “Barcelona reinvented itself as a tourism city, a city for the visitor economy, and introduced much more tourist-friendly policies.”
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