Barcelona anti-tourism activists vandalise bikes and bus

The youth wing of a Catalan political party has posted a video of its members vandalising bicycles, days after it slashed the tyres of a tour bus near FC Barcelona’s stadium and sprayed the windscreen with the slogan “Tourism kills neighbourhoods”.

Arran, the youth wing of the radical CUP (Popular Unity Candidacy) party, has claimed responsibility for the anti-tourism campaign. CUP, which is propping up the centre-right nationalist Catalan government, has been criticised over its refusal to condemn the attacks.

Santi Vila, the Barcelona city councillor in charge of business, said the CUP was “making a big mistake”, adding that Arran’s campaign harmed the image of Barcelona and Catalonia and “won’t help the cause of independence”.

The CUP had remained silent until the video of the bicycle attacks emerged on Tuesday. Then Mireia Boya, a CUP member of the Catalan parliament, dismissed Vila’s “neo-liberalism”, saying it amounted to “pure economic violence”.

“We are constantly asked to repudiate violence when the violence is provoked by the Catalan government,” Boya said.
Laura Flores, a spokesperson for Arran, said the vandalism was “a response to the violence we face every day. The street must be allowed to speak, it’s the only place where we can fight.”

The most recent attacks were against tourist bicycles that are locked to public bike racks and that users can release via an app.

The scheme is a sore point among the city’s cyclists and many have complained that public facilities paid for by taxpayers are being used for profit. There are insufficient bike racks in the city and cyclists are fined if they lock their bikes to railings or lamp-posts.

It followed the attack last week on the tour bus at Barcelona’s Camp Nou stadium in which passengers, many of then with young children, believed they were being attacked by terrorists.

One said he was expecting someone to come armed with a gun or a knife and was relieved when it turned out they were just painting graffiti.
Although the bus attack took place last Thursday it did not come to light until Friday. The delay prompted former Barcelona mayor Xavier Trias to accuse the incumbent, Ada Colau, of a cover-up. “Covering up acts of vandalism is the same as justifying them,” he said.

Colau tweeted soon after the bus attack that “protesting against tourism should never mean intimidating people”.

Colau has made herself unpopular with the industry after she introduced a moratorium on new hotels and cracked down on illegal holiday apartments in response to growing disquiet over tourism in the city, which has grown exponentially in recent years.

In the past year there have been a series of protests as residents complain that massive tourism and rising rents are driving them out of their city. Several hotels have been paint-bombed this year and anti-tourist graffiti has appeared in many parts of the city.

The tour bus company, which carries 5.3 million passengers a year, estimated the damage to the bus at €1,842.