Asked which visitors they would like more of, Barcelona picked the ones who come to learn something

Barcelona asks its own residents what they think of the people who come here. It has done it every year since 2016, it publishes the questionnaire and the sample size, and it puts the whole thing online as a PDF.

Most articles about this quote two numbers from it. We quote two of them ourselves, in the piece about when to come, because they are the two that matter for choosing a month.

This page is about the other tables, which almost nobody reads, and which are more interesting than the headline.

The list of places

The survey asks whether tourism has made you stop visiting somewhere in the city. 57.6 % say yes. Then it asks where, and 999 people answer.

Place	Share of those who avoid somewhere
La Rambla	27.1 %
Plaça de Catalunya – Passeig de Gràcia	26.8 %
The seafront	26.3 %
El Gòtic – El Raval – the old town	25.5 %
«The centre», unspecified	22.6 %
The Sagrada Família area	17.4 %
Park Güell	14.6 %
El Born	7.4 %
The Sagrada Família itself	7.1 %
The cathedral and Santa Maria del Mar	3.9 %
Gràcia	2.9 %
Montjuïc and Plaça d’Espanya	2.1 %

Read the top and the bottom of that table together, because they are the same neighbourhood.

La Rambla is first at 27.1 %. The cathedral and Santa Maria del Mar are eleventh at 3.9 %. You can walk between them in eight minutes. The Born, which is the same medieval city on the other side of Via Laietana, is at 7.4 %.

Whatever is being avoided, it is not the old town. It is a specific corridor: the promenade, the boulevard, the beach, the block around one basilica. Four honeypots and the streets that funnel into them.

That is a much more usable fact than «locals avoid the centre», and it is the city’s own data saying it.

The bottom of the table is a Montjuïc story

Montjuïc and Plaça d’Espanya: 2.1 %. Lower than Gràcia. Lower than everything.

Barcelona’s second-biggest concentration of museums, its 1929 exposition grounds, its Olympic ring, its castle and its cemetery — and residents have not written it off. We have argued before that Montjuïc is where people who live here go, and this is the closest thing to a measurement of it that exists.

The tourism observatory’s other survey says the same thing from the visitor side: the share of tourists who go up the hill fell from 65.0 % in 2022 to 55.3 % in 2025, and it is the one major destination in the city that residents are not walking away from at the same time.

The question that gets worse the closer it gets

The survey asks whether tourism is beneficial or harmful three times, at three distances. Same respondents, same afternoon.

Beneficial or harmful for…	Beneficial	Harmful
Barcelona	59.6 %	33.1 %
Their own neighbourhood	50.1 %	36.0 %
Them, personally	41.0 %	41.4 %

Zoom in and the majority evaporates. By the third row it has gone: the personal answer is a dead heat, with harmful very slightly ahead.

Now the same three questions, asked only of people who live in a neighbourhood the survey classes as touristic — which is the neighbourhood this page is about:

Beneficial or harmful for…	Beneficial	Harmful
Barcelona	49.1 %	41.3 %
Their neighbourhood	38.1 %	55.0 %
Them, personally	29.2 %	54.7 %

It does not just narrow. It inverts.

People living inside the tourist city say, by better than five to four, that the thing is harmful to the streets they live on and to them. And they are the ones you will walk past.

The number we did not expect

Then there is a table nobody quotes, and it is the reason we wrote this page.

The survey reads out five kinds of visitor and asks whether Barcelona should encourage more of them, leave things as they are, or limit them.

Kind of visitor	Encourage	Limit
Coming for education or training	87.9 %	6.3 %
Professional — fairs, congresses, meetings	77.9 %	14.6 %
Sporting or cultural events	68.4 %	21.7 %
Holidays	30.3 %	59.1 %
Cruise passengers	23.0 %	66.7 %

Two thirds of the city would limit cruise passengers, and in July 2025 the city and the port signed a protocol that demolishes three terminals. Nearly six in ten would limit holiday tourism. The survey’s own summary notes that the position on holiday tourism has moved 24.5 points since 2021 and on cruises 17.4 points.

And at the top of the same table, with the highest score of anything asked, 87.9 % would encourage people who come to learn something. Fourteen to one in favour.

We are not going to pretend that answer was about walking tours. Most respondents were probably picturing students and conferences. But it is the only category in the survey with a fourteen-to-one margin, and it is the one thing this city says out loud that it still wants more of.

What we do with that, honestly

We sell a two-hour walk through the neighbourhood at the top of the avoidance table. There is no version of this page where we are outside the problem.

So the useful part is the shape of the numbers rather than a slogan.

The corridor is the problem, not the district. 27.1 % against 3.9 %, eight minutes apart. Everything we run in the old city is built on the streets in the second figure, and that is not a marketing decision — it is where the interesting things are anyway. The Gothic Quarter walk starts in Plaça Nova at the Roman gate and never uses La Rambla as anything but a boundary to cross, which is also what La Rambla actually is.

The hour does more than the route. The after-dark version exists because the same streets at half past nine at night hold a fraction of the people, and because that is when the neighbourhood is any good.

And Montjuïc is at 2.1 %. The Montjuïc walk goes to the one large piece of visitable Barcelona that the people who live here have not given up on, which is a strange thing to be able to say with a citation.

A note on what this survey is and is not

It interviews 1,732 residents. It is an opinion survey, it says so, and the percentages carry the usual sampling error — the smaller the sub-group, the wobblier the figure. The 999 who named a place are a sub-sample of a sub-sample, and the low end of that table is built on small numbers.

It also does not measure crowding. Nothing here counts a single person on La Rambla; there is no official footfall figure for that street at all, which is worth knowing the next time you read one. This measures what residents say they do, which is a different and in some ways more honest thing.

What it does support, and what we would stand behind: the avoidance is specific, it is getting more common every year, and the part of the city being avoided is smaller and better defined than the phrase «the Gothic Quarter» suggests.

If you want the rest of the argument, whether the neighbourhood earns your afternoon and whether it is safe are the two pages next to this one, and what to see, in an order that does not double back is the one with the map in it.