Tourism spoils local communities with prosperity

Before visiting Barcelona at Christmas in 2015, I remember going to YouTube to watch the film Bye Bye Barcelona, which is a documentary about the negative effects of mass tourism on the people of the city.

The film is made by a local artist who explores the fraught relationship between Barcelona as a living population and Barcelona as a tourist destination. He interviews fellow residents who complain that the city is becoming a theme park. One laments the city's 'loss of enchantment'.

Part of me can't take these complaints too seriously, given that the people of Barcelona owe much of their relative prosperity to tourism. That's the main reason Barcelona's regional unemployment rate in 2014 was 19 per cent compared to the national figure of 24 per cent.

Yesterday The Guardian published an article about tension between tourists and locals in New Zealand over access to public toilets.

One North Island resident complained that 50 people each night used a toilet block that contained a single toilet. If the queues got too long, the tourists simply use the nearby bushes and contribute to the contamination of rivers and beaches.

One of the towns mentioned in the article was Glenorchy, a tiny community of 363, an hour's drive to the west of Queenstown on the South Island. It is at the end of the road and the end of the lake that makes Queenstown such a scenic tourist destination.

I have two images in my mind of our visit to Glenorchy. One was the thriving dumpling shop that was set up to profit from Chinese tourists. The other was a funeral procession, demonstrating that life in Glenorchy is not entirely about tourism, that there is a living community made up of real people.

Queenstown has a picturesque lake and many adventure tourism assets. There are only 14,300 permanent residents. Our impression was that it was spoiled by the volume of tourists, and we drove straight through.

It's clear that Queenstown's infrastructure can't sustain the tourist boom. The traffic on its congested main through road is slower than what you would expect in peak hour in major cities in more populated countries. But who wants a four lane highway replacing the existing two lane through road that winds around one side of the lake?

Queenstown is just the first of many South Island towns to face an explosion in tourist numbers. On the other side of the mountain is Wanaka, another lakeside mountain resort town that is poised for similar development. I've heard that numbers developers have approvals in hand. 

Meanwhile there is the quirky east coast town of Oamaru, with its many well-preserved Victorian buildings. It is made for tourism but - mercifully? - there are still relatively few tourists.

On Tuesday afternoon, we visited 'Steam Punk HQ'. This is a collection of industrial sculptures and audio visual installations in darkened rooms that reflect what seemed like a particular local hobbyist's interpretation of the steampunk science fiction sub-genre.

But it could have a big future as part of an Oamaru theme park. Within a year of its 2011 opening, TripAdvisor was rating it as one of New Zealand's best new tourist attractions. It fits with the town's Victorian era ambience, and is complemented by retail shops specialising in steampunk clothing and accessories. Numbers will swell suring the Steampunk NZ Festival Weekend at the beginning of June, but essentially it is fairly quiet for most of the time, for now.

Some of the locals want it to stay quiet, according to my friend Nathalie, whom we visited there. But others realise that the industries that sustained Oamaru in the past have gone, and tourism is their big opportunity to return to prosperity.

The choice may not be entirely theirs. The 2016 edition of Lonely Planet described Oamaru as 'New Zealand's coolest town'.