During the height of the summer tourism season, frustrated residents in Barcelona organized protests. Some carried signs that read “tourists go home” and paraded them past restaurants packed with travelers. Others aimed water guns at diners and sprayed them while they tried to eat.
Travel experts have given a variety of reasons for why cities like Barcelona feel inundated with tourists. Cruise ships have gotten bigger, travel surged after the pandemic lockdowns, and low-cost airlines make it easier to hop from one city to the next.
Overtourism might be new, but leisure travel is thousands of years old. The ancients also liked to travel, and similar to modern tourists today, they tended to follow the same itineraries and hit the same spots. Sometimes – they even irritated the locals with their bad behavior.
Tourism in Ancient Times
The travel practices of the Augustans have lent insight as to what the ancients were like as tourists. Emperor Augustus ruled Rome from 27 B.C.E. to 14 A.D., and there is evidence of Augustan tourism in Egypt, Greece, modern-day Turkiye, and Sicily, says Loykie Lominé, an associate lecturer at The Open University in Milton Keynes, England.
