Some protesters drove tractors, others rode bikes. Thousands more marched through the streets of Barcelona by foot. Their goal: to stop the €3.2bn (£2.75bn) expansion of the city’s airport, which will see passengers rise from 55 million per year to 70 million by 2038.
Barcelona’s residents, already the driving force of overtourism demonstrations in Spain, voiced their anger on Sunday, holding placards with the words: “Sorry tourist, BCN is already sold out.”
A mock-up of an airport departure board read: “Future: cancelled, nature: cancelled, air: contaminated”, while other demonstrators propped up a giant figure of a white stork – one of the birds of the wetlands under threat if the expansion goes ahead.
The government-approved project flies in the face of its stated plans to limit sky-high visitor numbers in the popular tourist destination, which previously led residents to squirt water pistols at holiday-markers.
The protests have echoed across Spain, in Malaga, Madrid, Ibiza, the Canary Islands and Mallorca, where locals say they are being forced out by overtourism.
An estimated 5,000 marched through Ibiza Town on the weekend in a rally against the expansion of the island’s airport, with images of planes with crosses through them. Hundreds also descended on , Mallorca’s capital to protest the expansion of Palma airport.
“Palma cannot be a mere backdrop for tourists and millionaires,” said local politician David Pujol, insisting that the airport should not be “a tourism machine that is always demanding further growth”.
Protesters in Mallorca are concerned over the promotion of new international routes, including services from Canada and Abu Dhabi. Spokesperson Pere Joan Femenia called for measures to limit private jets, telling the Majorca Daily Bulletin: “It’s unacceptable that planes are still flying over our homes after midnight.”
According to Femenia, Palma’s operational limit of 66 flights per hour “has been exceeded several times this summer” and the islanders are “at their limit”.
The demonstrators oppose plans to expand the city’s airport. (Photo: Getty Images)Police said 10,000 people were involved in the Barcelona protests. Zeroport, the umbrella organisation representing 200 different groups including those opposing more cruise ships coming to the city, claimed about 50,000 people took to the streets.
“We are thousands of people who have come here today to show the public’s rejection of a project which, if it goes ahead, will make some of the worst problems we have right now even worse – the housing crisis, the climate emergency and overtourism,” Joan Manel, of Zeroport, told The i Paper. “This is going to be a long fight but this is the first big demonstration, and we will stop this project going ahead.”
Daniel Pardo, another activist, said: “This is a critical moment and people must come together to stop this now.”
Barcelona received nearly 16 million visitors in 2025, a 2.9 per cent increase compared to 2024. José Antonio Donaire, Barcelona City Council’s commissioner for sustainable tourism, recently said the city’s strategy was “not one tourist more”.
“We don’t want to grow more,” he told the New York Times in July. “We want the tourists that the city already has. There were 15.7 million tourists in the city in 2025 – that’s the threshold. 16 million is the maximum.”
The planned expansion, which will be paid for by state-run airport operator Aena, will be a test case for the EU, which must decide if it chooses to prioritise an environmentally protected wetland area next to the airport. Aena also plans to expand Madrid, Malaga and Bilbao airports.
Salvador Illa, Catalan’s regional president, has argued the airport expansion is necessary for Barcelona to become a major hub for intercontinental connections, offering more flights from Asia and the Americas to attract talent and investment.
Spain is not alone in this paradox. Cities like Venice, Amsterdam, Lisbon, which have struggled to control the number of visitors, also plan to develop their airports.
In Venice, where officers equipped with QR scanners check if tourists have paid the day-tripper fee to cut overtourism, Marco Polo Airport ins undergoing an expansion that will increase capacity from 11.6 million to 20 million passengers per year.
Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam is building a 592,000-square-foot boarding gate area that will open next year. The expansion of Athens airport will increase passenger numbers from 26 million to 40 million per year.
The ambitious plans to expand airports as demand for travel booms threatens climate change targets for host countries. A study released this month by Transport and Environment, a climate advocacy group based in Brussels, found expansions at 20 of the largest airports in Europe will cause the countries to surpass the national carbon budgets needed to hold global warming to 1.7 degrees Celsius.
“It definitely is a contradiction,” Alex Chapman, from the New Economics Foundation, a think tank in London, told The New York Times last week.
“There are cases like Barcelona where you’ve got a population that’s almost on the streets in revolt at what they perceive to be unsustainable and unfair tourist industry practices. To be proposing another huge expansion of the airport alongside that is just hard to reconcile.”
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