Cities Don’t Just Manage Overtourism. They Help Create It.

From a €6.6 million airline tender in A Coruña to new fines in Valencia, governments promote demand before policing its consequences.

While researching a trip my wife and I want to take from Valencia to Spain’s north next summer, I stumbled upon something undercovered in the debate around overtourism.

We’re planning to make our way through Spain’s north entirely by train, then fly back to Valencia from our final stop. A Coruña is one possibility, so I checked whether there’s a direct flight between the two cities.

I expected to find that an airline had decided there was sufficient demand for a direct flight. Instead, I found a public procurement process intended to help create or secure that demand.

The public debate about tourism usually begins when somebody steps off a plane.

But the story begins before the route exists.

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The municipal Tourism and Congress Consortium in A Coruña has tendered five route-linked tourism-promotion contracts. Bidding closes August 21.

In practical terms, the government is offering public financial support to attract airlines to the city. That’s not unusual, but it is intriguing amid the persistent focus on overtourism throughout Europe, particularly in Spain.

The base budget is €4.93 million through 2029 and can reach €6.62 million if extended through 2030. The routes are Málaga, Valencia, Bilbao, Sevilla, and Alicante.

The Valencia portion requires 208 annual flights and at least 37,440 available seats, with spending capped at €302,500 annually. Across all five routes, the tender seeks approximately 186,000 seats initially and more than 203,000 in later years. Those are two-way seats, not 203,000 incoming tourists.

Legally, these are tourism-promotion and connectivity contracts—not straightforward payments for individual passengers. But the promotion and the flights are inseparable.

Winning airlines must operate specified routes with specified frequencies and capacity while advertising A Coruña through their websites, search engines, social media, newsletters, aircraft, and airports. They must also provide seats for media and tourism-industry familiarization trips.

A Coruña isn’t literally buying airline tickets. But it is buying tourism promotion from airlines on the condition that those airlines operate the routes the city wants.

No route, no contract. It’s all aboveboard and regulated by the European Commission aviation-aid framework.

For some context, low-cost carrier Volotea stopped flying from A Coruña to Valencia and Málaga in April after its previous municipal agreement ended. The airline wanted to continue negotiating; the mayor said the airlines’ financial demands were unaffordable.

Several months later, the city introduced this new tender to restore those routes.

Like most Spanish cities, A Coruña has talked about “quality” and sustainable tourism. It began charging a tourist tax in September 2025 because officials said increasing hotel occupancy, cruises, and visitor numbers were creating additional costs and “massification” in some neighborhoods.

Yet the city also calls tourism crucial for employment and wealth and is now explicitly trying to increase its attractiveness and accessibility.

That’s an economic reality that I don’t think even the most hardcore activists would deny. The friction begins when cities aggressively expand tourist access—often through low-cost airlines—then treat the resulting volume and behavior as though they developed independently of those choices.

A Coruña says tourist-tax revenue can support services, preservation—and the promotion and development of sustainable tourism. But the stated policy reveals that the tax is intended to manage and support tourism, not discourage it.

During the tax’s first three months, A Coruña collected more than €400,000 while overnight stays rose more than 14 percent. The city presented the increase as evidence that the tax had not hurt tourism.

Of course, it didn’t.

In my experience, tourist taxes feel like pesky but acceptable add-on fees. My wife and I paid them on recent trips to Barcelona and Granada—just like any other tourists, including Spaniards.

They’re not going to stop a trip, particularly if you’re getting a “deal” to fly between cities on low-cost airlines.

For the record, we took the train for all legs of that trip.

In my opinion, more countries should follow France’s lead and put meaningful restrictions on short-haul flights. France prohibits certain flights when a satisfactory train alternative takes under two and a half hours. Even that policy could go several steps farther.

But at least it addresses climate change and the decision to fly rather than take the train. A tourist tax adds a relatively painless charge after the decision has already been made.

If you want “high-quality” tourists, your policy needs to be more than encouraging cheap flights then charging arrivals between €1.00 and €2.50 per person, per night on top of the cost of their accommodations, as A Coruña does. That’s not a lot of money within the context of a trip.

Barcelona goes considerably farther—roughly €6 to €12 per person, per night, depending on the accommodation—but I can’t imagine the tax has stopped a significant number of tourists, of any quality, from coming.

A Coruña isn’t trying to reduce tourism. It’s trying to increase it while using a modest tax to manage the consequences.

This piece is exactly the kind of work I asked readers to help me build.

It started with checking for a flight and led through public tender documents, tourism policy, airport data, and what I see on Valencia’s streets.

If you want more independently reported essays like this, become a paid subscriber. Ongoing support gives me the time to follow ordinary observations into the systems behind them.

Which brings me back to Valencia.

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Over the last several weeks, a local activist I follow has been documenting a considerably less abstract version of this story.

He has been highlighting a social media hashtag—Valencia is calling—used by young people from across Europe taking advantage of cheap airfares to come here and party.

It’s relatively inexpensive to reach Valencia, stay a few days, and eat and drink—or get drunk—here. So they’re choosing to go all-in amid one of the most beautiful backdrops in the world.

On social media, this could look like an effective advertisement for the city.

On the ground, the activist documents what can come with it: public drunkenness, people walking through residential neighborhoods shirtless or half-naked, noise at all hours, and tourists staying in street-level Airbnbs who drag furniture onto the sidewalk as if the space outside their temporary apartment is an extension of their living room.

I’m the first to advocate for lively and vibrant neighborhoods. We live in one where I have few major complaints—maybe because I sleep with earplugs and have a longstanding preference for a little urban grit and chaos over suburban soullessness.

That said, you’d have to be blind not to see the effects of low-quality tourism.

I could list them all day so I’ll just go with the latest micro and seemingly meaningless example.

The other day, as I rode in the street-level bike lane alongside Turia Park through Valencia’s Old City, I came upon a dozen young Dutch girls taking up both sides of a two-way bike lane. The Dutch—at least the young party-tourist variety—are often among the worst offenders.

I admonished them in my best Spanish and moved on.

One incident means practically nothing. Hundreds of versions of it every day start to affect how a place feels and functions.

Has tourism ruined my quality of life in Valencia? Not even close. But waiting until it does would be a ridiculous standard.

To be clear, Valencia is calling isn’t an official City Hall campaign. I have no evidence that the city created it or has anything directly to do with the people posting under it.

It’s a bunch of kids selling Valencia to one another as a playground—sometimes as travelers and influencers, sometimes as drunks.

Once a city becomes cheap and exceptionally easy to reach, the government no longer controls how it gets sold. City Hall can advertise culture, gastronomy, sustainability, and Mediterranean quality of life. TikTok can turn the same place into an inexpensive weekend-long party.

The city can target the tourist it wants. It can’t decide who buys the €39 ticket.

Valencia’s government says it wants “quality, not quantity.” Mayor María José Catalá has gone as far as saying, “We don’t want low-cost tourism that doesn’t respect the city.”

At the same time, the city-backed Fundació Visit València actively works with airlines to increase connectivity. Through its Fly València program, it participates in route negotiations, promotes new connections, and conducts joint marketing with airlines and travel platforms.

I haven’t found a Valencia tender directly comparable to the one in A Coruña. The machinery isn’t identical.

But Valencia is hardly sitting back and waiting for tourists to discover it.

During the summer of 2025, the airport offered 3.6 million seats on arriving flights—4.3 percent more than the year before—with 37 airlines connecting the city to more than 100 destinations. City Hall described those numbers as the product, at least in part, of coordinated work between the Fundació Visit València, airlines, and other destinations.

The airport ultimately handled a record 11.85 million passenger movements in 2025, an increase of 9.6 percent. International traffic—which represented three-quarters of the total—rose nearly 13 percent.

Recently, billboards around Valencia boasted about all the new places you can fly to directly from here.

Every outbound route is an inbound route, too.

This past week, Valencia took its “quality tourism” rhetoric another step forward.

Catalá announced a proposed new convivencia ordinance that would impose fines of up to €3,000 for the most serious forms of so-called uncivil behavior.

The highest penalties would apply to full nudity or clothing that leaves sexual organs exposed in streets, public spaces, or public transportation. Other serious and minor violations would carry smaller fines.

The mayor presented the measure as part of an effort to protect residents and reinforce Valencia’s reputation as a respectful, quality destination.

I’m fine with the fines.

I don’t want people pissing in the street, getting wasted outside somebody’s bedroom, doing drugs in a playground at three in the morning, treating residential sidewalks like the patio of their Airbnb, or walking around my neighborhood as if they never left the beach.

Punish that behavior.

But don’t confuse punishing it with addressing the system that helps produce more of it.

Cheap tickets don’t automatically create bad tourists. My wife and I use low-cost airlines. Most people who do arrive, enjoy themselves, and leave without dragging an IKEA table onto the sidewalk or walking around in a bikini when they’re nowhere near the beach.

Likewise, somebody who spends €500 a night at a hotel isn’t necessarily a good neighbor or somehow less implicated in the pressures tourism places on public space and housing.

That’s why quality tourism is such slippery political language.

It combines spending, behavior, length of stay, choice of accommodation, and cultural interest into one imaginary visitor who spends heavily, behaves perfectly, and barely leaves a footprint.

Valencia is expanding access while trying to filter the consequences through restrictions on tourist apartments, behavioral rules, and fines. Some of those responses are necessary.

Yet all of them operate downstream from the machinery still working to bring more people here: airline negotiations, promotional campaigns, record airport capacity, cheap fares, tourism platforms, social-media algorithms, and the public and private institutions that benefit every time another visitor arrives.

The drunk, ass-out, or shirt-off tourist is tough to miss. So are the Dutch girls blocking the bike lane, the bike tours crowding plazas and otherwise calm neighborhood streets, and the people dragging furniture out of their Airbnb or clattering enormous suitcases down the sidewalk—just travel with a backpack for fuck’s sake.

This is all easy to photograph, easy to mock, easy to fine, and easy to blame.

The procurement contract and the route-development program are much harder to see.

If the A Coruña–Valencia route returns, anyone who uses it to visit A Coruña won’t be arriving against the city’s wishes.

They’ll be accepting an invitation it spent public money to send.

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