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# Tourists Go Home. But Where Is Home?
- URL: https://the-second-home.ghost.io/tourists-go-home-but-where-is-home/
- Published: 2026-08-27T16:55:38.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-27T16:55:38.000Z
- Author: Barbara Orzel

Barcelona has a way of writing its conflicts directly onto its walls.

During Festa Major de Gràcia this year, some of the messages were particularly difficult to miss.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b6/8b/b68b0831-5fe6-4a64-b3e8-fe6b2cf40952/content/images/2026/08/IMG_4825.jpeg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b6/8b/b68b0831-5fe6-4a64-b3e8-fe6b2cf40952/content/images/2026/08/IMG_4824.jpeg)

And above one street:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b6/8b/b68b0831-5fe6-4a64-b3e8-fe6b2cf40952/content/images/2026/08/IMG_4862.jpeg)

Welcome to the Vila de Gràcia. This is not Spain. We are the Catalan Countries.

Seen separately, these might appear to belong to different conversations: overtourism, language, Catalan identity, neighbourhood politics. In Gràcia, however, they inhabit the same walls, balconies, utility boxes and festival streets. They form part of the same visual environment.

The interesting question is not whether they express one coherent political position. They clearly do not.

The interesting question is what happens when all these claims about place appear together.

*Tourists go home* sounds wonderfully uncomplicated until its vocabulary is taken seriously.

The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines a tourist as “a person who is travelling or visiting a place for pleasure.”

That definition already creates a distinction which urban political language often blurs.

A foreigner is not necessarily a tourist. Neither is a migrant, a student, a temporary worker or somebody who simply moved to the city. At the same time, a person can live relatively nearby and still arrive in a neighbourhood as a visitor.

The category describes a particular relationship with a place rather than a nationality.

This matters in Barcelona because the criticism of tourism is attached to very real material problems. The housing market is one of the most obvious. Short-term and temporary accommodation competes with ordinary residential use, while neighbourhoods increasingly have to perform several functions at once: home, investment, destination and product.

One mural I photographed elsewhere in Barcelona made that economic dimension unusually explicit. Under the words TOURISM IS KILLING THIS CITY!, it invoked *Marca Barcelona* and contrasted neighbours with investors.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b6/8b/b68b0831-5fe6-4a64-b3e8-fe6b2cf40952/content/images/2026/08/IMG_7826-1.jpeg)

Ciutat Vella, March 2025

That is already a rather different proposition from simply telling an individual tourist to leave.

One attacks a model of the city.

The other addresses a person.

The second half of *Tourists go home* is no less interesting.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b6/8b/b68b0831-5fe6-4a64-b3e8-fe6b2cf40952/content/images/2026/08/IMG_1071-1.jpeg)

La Vila de Gràcia, August 2024

Oxford gives one meaning of *home* as the house or flat in which somebody lives. Another expands it considerably: the town, district or country that somebody comes from or where they are living and feel they belong.

That small *or* matters.

Home does not have to be reducible to birthplace.

Modern cities are full of people whose relationship with place is more complicated than the opposition between *local* and *tourist* allows. People migrate. They work abroad. They build households in new cities. Some move permanently; others divide their lives between places. Some become deeply embedded in a neighbourhood without ever becoming native to it.

In that context, *go home* starts to raise an awkward question:

But where is home?

This is especially striking in a city whose global attractiveness and local resistance to that attractiveness now coexist so visibly.

Festa Major de Gràcia intensifies the paradox.

The festival is rooted in neighbourhood life and local participation. Yet precisely because it is distinctive, spectacular and strongly associated with Barcelona, it attracts people from outside the neighbourhood and outside the city.

Local culture becomes one of the things visitors come to see.

And so, within the same space, one can encounter **BENVINGUDES** — welcome — and **TOURISTS GO HOME**.

There is an additional linguistic twist.

One anti-tourism sticker I photographed read TOURISM KILLS THE CITY. Someone had attached a handwritten correction to it:

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b6/8b/b68b0831-5fe6-4a64-b3e8-fe6b2cf40952/content/images/2026/08/IMG_1716-1.jpeg)

Eixample, September 2025

The original message uses English because English maximises its chances of being understood by international visitors. The correction insists that even opposition to tourism should be expressed in the language of the place.

Communication and belonging suddenly pull in different directions.

This is where Gràcia's political landscape becomes particularly dense. Anti-tourism slogans coexist with demands to speak Catalan, declarations of Catalan national identity, anti-fascist imagery and other political symbols. Their coexistence should not be mistaken for a single ideology or for the collective opinion of a neighbourhood.

Public space is messier than that.

One person paints. Another sticks something over it. Someone adds a correction. A banner appears for a festival. A wall disappears during redevelopment. The argument continues elsewhere.

Looking through photographs taken over two years, I realised that I had been recording versions of this argument without deliberately building an archive of it.

Perhaps that is what makes these images interesting.

They do not tell us what Barcelona thinks.

They show us a city continually negotiating **who belongs, who visits, who profits, which language is spoken — and what it means to call somewhere home.**