In 2023, Barcelona residents sprayed tourists with water guns. Venetians staged funeral processions for their dying city. Across the world, from Dubrovnik to Bali, locals are pushing back against the very visitors their economies depend on. Something has gone deeply wrong with how we travel.

But this isn't just a story about overcrowding. It's about a decades-long transformation that turned travel from a rare privilege into a mass industry—and how that industry hollows out the very places it sells. The history of modern tourism reveals a pattern that keeps repeating: we love places to death, then move on to the next one.

Venice had 175,000 residents in 1951. Today it has fewer than 50,000. The apartments became Airbnbs. The bakeries became mask shops. The hardware stores became gelato stands. This isn't a natural evolution—it's what happens when an entire city restructures itself around visitors rather than inhabitants. Economists call it the "monoculture" problem: when tourism becomes the only viable business, everything else withers.

This pattern has deep roots. After World War II, European governments actively promoted tourism as a rebuilding strategy. Countries like Spain, Greece, and Italy poured investment into coastal resorts and heritage sites, betting that foreign visitors would fund recovery. It worked—spectacularly. But the model assumed tourism would complement local economies, not consume them. Nobody planned for a world where a single city might receive thirty million visitors a year against a resident population of fifty thousand.

The result is what urban planners now call "Venice Syndrome." Rents rise until locals can't afford them. Services reorient toward tourists. Schools close because there aren't enough children. Hospitals lose funding because the remaining population skews elderly. The city becomes a stage set—beautiful, preserved, and fundamentally lifeless. Amsterdam, Lisbon, Prague, and dozens of other cities now show early symptoms of the same condition.

Takeaway

When a place optimizes entirely for visitors, it stops functioning for the people who actually make it a living place. The authenticity tourists seek is destroyed by the very infrastructure built to serve them.

In 2016, a quiet lavender field in Valensole, France, received a manageable trickle of visitors. By 2019, after going viral on Instagram, farmers were building fences to stop thousands of people from trampling their crops for photos. The same story played out at Iceland's Fjaðrárgljúfur canyon, Japan's bamboo groves, and a simple painted wall in Chefchaouen, Morocco. Social media didn't just increase tourism—it concentrated it, sending enormous crowds to places with zero infrastructure to handle them.

This represents a genuinely new historical phenomenon. For most of the postwar era, tourism spread through guidebooks and travel agencies, which naturally distributed visitors across established destinations with existing capacity. Social media bypasses all of that. A single viral photo can redirect millions of people toward a fragile ecosystem, a sacred site, or a residential neighborhood overnight. There's no planning phase, no gradual buildup—just a sudden flood.

The damage compounds in ways that aren't always visible. Maya Bay in Thailand and Boracay in the Philippines both had to close entirely for ecological rehabilitation. But environmental destruction is only part of the story. When a quiet village suddenly appears on every influencer's feed, property values spike, longtime residents get priced out, and the community that made the place interesting dissolves. The algorithm optimizes for visual appeal, not carrying capacity.

Takeaway

Social media has decoupled tourism demand from any relationship with a destination's actual capacity. Places become popular not because they're ready for visitors, but because they photograph well—and by the time anyone notices the damage, it's already done.

Bhutan has charged tourists a daily fee—currently $100—since 1974. The policy was designed not to maximize revenue but to minimize impact, and for decades it kept visitor numbers manageable while funding conservation and education. More recently, other destinations have started experimenting with similar approaches. Venice introduced a day-tripper entry fee in 2024. Amsterdam banned new tourist shops from the city center. Japan closed a famous photo spot near Mount Fuji after crowds became unmanageable.

These measures share a common ancestor in an idea that emerged during the 1970s environmental movement: carrying capacity. National parks had been using it for decades—limiting the number of hikers on a trail or campers in a valley. Applying it to cities and cultural sites is harder, politically and practically. Tourism employs people. Hotels pay taxes. Restricting visitors means real economic pain for workers who have no other options, especially in developing countries where tourism might represent a quarter of GDP.

The most promising models don't just cap numbers—they redistribute them. Portugal's "interior" tourism campaign steers visitors toward depopulated rural regions that desperately want them. Japan's regional rail passes encourage travelers to skip Tokyo for smaller cities. These approaches acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: the problem isn't that too many people want to travel. It's that they all want to go to the same twenty places, at the same time, for the same photos.

Takeaway

Limiting tourism is necessary but not sufficient. The deeper challenge is redesigning the entire system so that travel benefits places rather than extracts from them—and that requires treating destinations as living communities, not consumable experiences.

The history of mass tourism is a story of unintended consequences. Postwar governments built an industry to spread prosperity, and it worked—until the scale overwhelmed the places it was meant to celebrate. Social media accelerated a pattern that was already unsustainable.

Understanding this history matters because it shows us this isn't inevitable. Tourism was designed, promoted, and subsidized into its current form. That means it can be redesigned. The question isn't whether we should travel—it's whether we can learn to travel in ways that leave places better than we found them.