by Lacey Pfalz
Last updated: 12:00 PM ET, Wed January 15, 2025
Spain set an international visitor record in 2024, welcoming 94 million tourists into the country during a year when residents flooded to the streets to protest overtourism’s negative impact on their daily lives, including a burgeoning housing crisis that’s taken governmental action to help alleviate.
According to the Associated Press, 2024 was the second record-breaking year since 2019. It ranks second worldwide after France.
Spain’s Ministry of Tourism reported that during the first eleven months of 2024, international visitor totals were up 10.7 percent year-over-year, and they’d spent about $7.7 billion euro in November alone. During the first eleven months, international tourists spend about $110 billion euro.
Despite the tourist income, troubles of overtourism and the housing crisis in destinations like Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca highlighted the nation’s crisis, signalling that there can, in fact, be too much of a good thing.
Malaga was one of the first telling tourists to go home in March, but protests hit a fever pitch in the summer, when thousands took to the streets in Mallorca and Barcelona protesting overtourism and urging the governments to act in banning or at least restricting the number of short-term vacation rentals that are available.
Barcelona hopes to ban tourist rentals altogether by 2028. Alicante, a smaller destination popular with British tourists, is banning new short-term tourist rentals for the next two years to combat unsustainable housing prices.
Yet these new laws and protests aren’t hindering international visitors: the Ministry of Tourism reported airlines are flying 7.9 million seats on planes heading to Spain in January, up 6.5 percent from January 2024. Air capacity growth could lead to record visitor totals once more.
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