The FITUR – Spain’s gigantic tourism fair – is now over. Deals have been struck, hotels booked, new attractions publicised and above all, 2025 is met with optimism and faith.
The goal is to bring 100 million foreign tourists to Spain this year (it was 94m in 2024) – and to increase the money taken last year (a tidy 126,000 million euros), and just maybe increase the percentage of Spain’s GDP to be marked down to tourism.
Tourism is an excellent industry, as they come, they pay, and (best of all) they go. During their brief visit, they spend every day on drink, on food, on hotels and on souvenirs. Apart from a tee-shirt or a decorated pot, they won’t export anything from Spain in exchange for their money much beyond a hangover, a sunburn and a maybe a secret telephone number or email address from someone they met at the hotel disco.
And all that lovely money. Most of it is spent in places where neither Spaniards nor foreign residents tend to go: whether the tour-hotels; those AirBnb homes; the spoiled and overcrowded attractions (think the Alhambra, the Grand Mosque, the Sagrada Familia or other ‘untenable popularity’ places as listed recently by Fodor) or indeed in the tacky souvenir shops. Those businesses relying on tourism – rather than residents – will have their own solutions to bring to the table: more tourism please, and let’s stop with that ‘Tourist Go Home’ stuff.
FITUR was good for tourism, but it was also good for Madrid. 225,000 people came to the show, and the city took in, says a tourist-page, an extra 445 million euros in those five days.
Spain, says CNN, and looking at the American market, is ‘the red-hot tourist destination’.
In his New Year’s speech, the mayor of Málaga Francisco De la Torre warned about La turismofobia and calls for moderation because, he said, "the success of Málaga" depends on tourism’. We need to take note of this, because not only does tourism help Spain’s GDP, it is also less tiresome for we residents than living in a town dedicated to factories or heavy industry.