Barcelona is not the only city in the world that attracts a large number of tourists. Many cities attract more. Yet Barcelona is the only place I see with so many of these xenophobic nutjobs.

Then you’ve never interacted with the locals in these other places. Having grown up in a vacation town, I can tell you right now that the only difference here is that the people with water guns have hit their breaking points.

Have you ever seen the movie Jaws? There’s a small throwaway bit in there where the wife of the chief of police is asking a friend of hers when she gets to be an islander (because the family had recently moved to the island from New York), and her friend responds, “Never. If you weren’t born here, then you’re not an islander.” Having grown up near where that movie was made, that’s 100% accurate to the local sentiment. On that island, they call people who move there “wash ashores” because they feel that they washed up like the flotsam and jetsam on the beach. In my town, we called the rich people who would come up to vacation in their lavish summer homes “snowbirds” because they migrated at the same time as the birds and couldn’t handle the winter weather.

The most consistent thing I’ve found about tourist areas is the negative impact the industry has on the area for locals and the hatred locals feel towards the tourists.

Whether these people are acting rightly or wrongly, they’re trying to hit the government and businesses where it hurts most - their profits - because it’s the only way they’ll ever care about the local problems.