The prohibition of tourist apartments and stopping the promotion of the city have been two of the requests that the participants in a demonstration called in Donostia through the platform Bizilagunekin to request the decrease in tourism in the capital of Gipuzkoa.
This demand was featured in the banner at the head of the march, in which more than a thousand people left the Alderdi Eder gardens at 12:00 p.m. and walked through several streets of the Old Town and the center to conclude in the square. Easo.
The protest has had the support of more than fifty associations, groups and organizations in Donostiaamong which are Stop Desahucios, Ulia Neighborhood Association, Martutene Bizirik, Eguzki, Ekologistak Martxan and the unions ELA, LAB, ESK, CCOO, CNT and Steilas.
During the tour, shouts such as “Housing is a right, not a business”, “No tourism, yes housing” and “Donostia ez dago salei” (Donostia is not for sale) were chanted.
The spokesperson for the Donostiarras Platform for Tourism Degrowth, Bizilagunekin, Asier Basurtohas highlighted in statements to the media the need to “put the living conditions of the inhabitants at the center” ahead of “always favoring tourism businesses.”
In that sense, he stressed that the city model of Donostia “has been made to favor business” in that sector, “which is getting worse and worse.” living conditions of the citizens”.
He stressed that there is “a process of expulsion” of San Sebastian residents from their city due to the housing shortagewhich “is very evident and is corroborated by the data.”
Asier Basurto: “The city is losing the best it has in favor of the business of a few”
“The city is losing the best it has in favor of the business of a few,” he considered.
For this reason, the platform it represents advocates “the path of tourism decrease” that entails a “change of model” and is not limited to “aesthetic measures such as limiting tourist groups.”
Basurto has defended a “global” change that must go through prohibition of tourist apartments, because in a “place where the demand for housing is so evident, it is not legitimate” for apartments with those characteristics to exist.
The spokesperson for Stop Evictions has stated the same thing, Rosa Garcia, who has remembered that the 40% of tourist homes of the Basque Autonomous Community are in Donostia, to which is added the “scourge” of temporary contracts, “which lack any type of regulation,” he assured.
“The moratorium alone is not enough, we must decrease, we must limit the number of tourist flats that are removing and stealing residential homes,” García denounced.
He has also advocated mobilizing the “5,000 empty homes that exist in the city” and reduce the “very high rents caused by investment funds.
García has demanded from the mayor of Donostia, Eneko Goiato “send now” the documentation to declare a stressed area to the city and “the abusive rents of the large owners, who have more than 3,000 homes” in the Gipuzkoa capital, can be limited.
Representatives of the Ulia Neighborhood Association have recalled that problems derived from tourism occur in many cities.
“We are all tourists and we are destroying ways of life around the world,” they said.
They have stressed that “it is not the market that has to regulate itself, but the public authority“which must be regulated “based on the wishes and good life of citizens.”
#thousand #people #Donostia #decrease #tourism #city
