Is there a responsible way to travel to festivals these days?

As I huddled under a dripping tent on Primavera Sound’s Thursday night, the biblical rain thundering down and the winds of rage whipping through the crowd, I couldn’t help but wonder: are these the karmic pangs of a city with a tourism problem, one of these festivals is getting worse?

A hyperbolic version of the water gun fight we’ve seen Barcelonaroads of recent years?

Time feels important.

This month the Pope Leo XIV officially inaugurated the final tower of the Sagrada Família, the iconic basilica that has been partially encased in scaffolding since the early 2000s.

Now that the central point of the country no longer resembles a construction site, will the number of tourists increase even further?

And is there a way to visit Barcelona, ​​or indeed any city, for big ticket events that favor visitors over locals?

The problem, in short

According to the latest figures, Barcelona welcomed over 16 million tourists in 2025, roughly ten times more than its resident population, making it one of the most visited cities in Europe.

The locals have not been calm about this. Recent years have seen residents take to the streets with water guns, drenching tourists in protest, while signs reading ‘tourists go home’ have become almost as iconic as the architecture.

These concerns do not seem to bother spanish government too.

Asked about the record 97 million visitors to Spain in 2025, Tourism Minister Jordi Hereu replied: “This is a collective success from the whole country that perfectly demonstrates the extraordinary attractiveness of Spain, because Spain is a country that seduces the world.”

With the Sagrada Família now fully unveiled and likely to attract a new wave of pilgrims, the pressure isn’t going anywhere.

And then there’s Primavera.

What began in 2001 as a modest showcase for independent music in a city still finding its post-Olympic identity has grown into one of the most coveted tickets on the festival circuit.

It’s always had a cool edge that other European festivals struggle to produce, and over the past two decades it’s become a cultural institution, attracting not just music fans, but the kind of crowd that treats the line-up like a personality test.

Nearly 300,000 of them descended on Barcelona last week alone (including myself).

Beautiful festival of European girls WINEdoing what he does best, and adding so much to a city that from the outside looks already packed.

And yet, here I was.

I arrived two days before the festival to wander around and find the bakeries I had pinned on Instagram.

As it turns out, this is a slow type of travel in itself.

Or so Mathew Prior, CEO of TrustedHousesitters, says: “The ones who get the most out of those trips aren’t the ones who rush in and out of a hotel. They’re the ones who stay long enough to live somewhere.’

Two days isn’t exactly a full ‘live’ dive, and I was staying in a hotel (Citadines Las Ramblas) instead of a hammock in someone’s spare room.

But that extra time allowed me to experience Barcelona beyond the wristband, which is, I would argue, the whole point.

Because I had Primavera as my main event, the pressure to hit the tourist attractions just wasn’t there.

There was no scramble for the Sagrada Familia, no queues outside the Picasso Museum.

Instead, I spent two hours in a side street cafe and tried on jewelry at TwoJeys for far longer than I should have.

As Meredith, slow travel writer in Two Packs and a Pup says: “Instead of treating travel like a checklist, slowing down allows you to really get to know a city.”

I felt like I absorbed the Catalan atmosphere in a more authentic way than if I had taken an open bus tour, and this is exactly what responsible event travel looks like in practice.

Nohl Martin, founder of ChooseWellTravel, describes a shift he is seeing in real time, from ‘event as destination to event as anchor’.

“People used to fly in for the race, the match, the festival and fly out. Now they’re treating the event as the raison d’être of travel, but they’re building real time in the country around it,” he says.

This frame is everything. And the numbers back it up.

New research from Sojern found that intra-European flight bookings are up 37% year-on-year, with Spain up 28% and Ital AND Portugal each with 24%.

Major events further fuel that drive, with British travelers currently leading the world in FIFA World Cup bookings.

We account for 19.4% of all international flight bookings in host cities, more than any other country.

The question of whether that journey was made responsibly is an issue worth sitting with.

A friend of mine recently bought Olivia Dean tickets in Amsterdam after getting lost in London.

Instead of treating it as a quick in-and-out, she turned it into a longer trip, one of her major holidays of the year.

She returned home after seeing Amsterdam. And so the journey to the event is made.

Inside Primavera, I spoke with Barcelona local Clara, who articulated the tension better than I could.

“I understand why people want to come,” she told me, “but if you’re here, be aware that there are people who live here and be respectful.”

Clara is right, and the good news is that responsible travel rarely requires grand gestures.

Lives in the little things: keeping the noise down, not walking shirtless three streets past the beach, rounding up the bill to leave a tip, and saying hola instead of hello.

Treating the place like somewhere people actually live, because it is.

So to answer the question: yes, there is a responsible way to travel to the event.

Stay a little longer, walk a little slower, and while you’re at it, try the bakery down the alley.

goodbye

MORE: Toxic fish with razor sharp teeth are invading Greece in the tourist season

MORE: The Highway to Hel 666 bus is revived after backlash from religious conservatives

MORE: The hypothesis about South Africa turned me off. Then I went there myself

REVIEWS


Add as favorite resource