Carmel Cacopardo

Too many tourists are flocking to these islands. Much more, in fact, than makes sense. Everywhere is overcrowded. It is the same all over most of Southern Europe. Malta is not an exception. Protests against over-tourism are taking place all over Southern Europe.

In Barcelona, demonstrators held signs emphasising that mass tourism kills the city. In Lisbon the issue is the dramatically increasing cost of housing attributed to the short-term rental market springing up in popular tourist destinations and squeezing out residents from their homes. Speculators are having a field-day.

Those organizing protests in San Sebastian commented that, “the tourist is not our enemy; our enemies are those who speculate on housing, those who exploit workers, and those who are profiting handsomely from the touristification of our cities.”

In Tenerife, the local residents too were out demonstrating: The Canary Islands have a limit, they said.

Does that sound familiar? What is the limit?

In Malta, 2024 was a record tourist year: 3.46 million tourists visited these islands. This number does not include day-trippers on cruise liners. This is definitely not good news.

Essentially over-tourism is having too many people in one place at a particular point in time. It has been described by some industry analysts as having too much of a good thing!

How much is too much?

Maybe, we have reached the limit when the employment generated by the tourism industry is no longer attractive to the Maltese. We have clearly reached that point some time back. The Deloitte report on the capacity of the tourism industry in Malta, commissioned by the Hotels and Restaurants Association (MHRA) and published some three years ago has already drawn our attention to this point.

In fact, the Deloitte report states that, in 2009, 82 per cent of those employed in the tourism sector were Maltese. By 2019 this statistic had decreased to 40.6 per cent. A staggering decrease in excess of 50 per cent!  The Deloitte report does not offer any specific explanation for this. Reliance on poor remuneration of seasonal and part-time labour is a most obvious contributor to the situation.

This increased reliance on non-Maltese labour by the tourism industry brings to the fore two additional issues. There is an economic leakage: wages generated by the tourism industry are logically exported by those earning them to their families. The economic benefits generated by the industry are thus not to our benefit as a country. In addition, the non-Maltese employees of the tourism industry have their own housing requirements, further pressuring the housing market and contributing to the rising property prices.

This is the tourism industry in 2025. Is it worth it?

Vision 2050 not only ignores all this: it sets a 5 million tourist target per annum. This ensures that matters will get much worse than they are today. Myopia 2050, maybe.

The powers that be, apparently, have not yet understood that tourism is not just about the tourist: it is first and foremost about us. It is about the quality of life of each and every one of us. About our housing requirements, about our environment and about the optimum use of the resources at our disposal.

Over-tourism is a threat to all this. Is it worth it?

Carmel Cacopardo is ADPD-The Green Party’s Deputy Chairperson

published in The Malta Independent on Sunday 6 July 2025