There's two sides to this story. This marked a significant improvement as the city began reopening and international travel resumed. Employment and Job Creation: The tourism sector significantly contributes to employment in Barcelona. In , the sector employed around , people, with nearly , contracts signed. Notably, more than half of these contracts were permanent, underscoring the sector's role in providing stable jobs. The subtext, which is absurd when made explicit, is that if not for tourism then those , people would not have jobs.
Moreover, whenever someone says "XYZ brings money to the area " you need to look at who in particular it's bringing money to. It's not like this money is being dropped out of a helicopter uniformly over the area's people. It's largely going to a relative few businesses and property owners, who spend a fraction of it in the local economy, who itself spends a fraction locally and so on.
The jobs being created aren't high-paying professional jobs either, they are largely service jobs in areas too expensive for the workers to live. So they have to commute long distances on often underdeveloped infrastructure.
Yup and usually it has a really bad effect on the housing market, especially for cities that are touristy the whole year. All the waiters and tour guides can't just re-train as semi-conductor technicians. Even given time, it's not obvious that Barcelona or Spain has the necessary pre-conditions to be globally competitive in another industry that would bring in the same amount of dollars per capita.
It's an extremely ambitious, all-hands-on-deck type of national undertaking to shoehorn your way into something. Japan did it with auto-manufacturing in the 30s. East Asia in general with high tech manufacturing. Barcelona is surprisingly competitive in the tech sector. Primarily foreign companies though. Uhh right, which is why allowing your economy to become a tourism-dependent monoculture is not good. You can argue on the basis of principles that tourism is bad.
