Croatian city of Dubrovnik overwhelmed by mass tourism 
 
 By: FRANCE 2 | Jessica SESTILI 
 
 Last year, over a million people visited the beautiful Croatian walled city of Dubrovnik. But the UNESCO World Heritage site on the Adriatic coast is becoming a victim of its own success. With thousands of visitors every day, Dubrovnik is suffering a similar fate to other mass tourist destinations throughout Europe. Authorities are now considering options to limit access to the Old City, as this report explains. 
 
 ADVERTISING ||||| Tourists in Barcelona taking pictures at 'La Boqueria' green market. Photo: AFP 
 
 Tourism has become the main issue of concern for Barcelona's residents ahead of unemployment, according to a survey published Friday by the city hall of the popular seaside resort. 
 
 Rising rental prices, noise and crowds jostling for space in the streets, the disappearance of traditional, every-day stores have all become irritants for those who still live in the central districts of the Mediterranean city, which gets millions of visitors every year. 
 
 According to the survey, tourism in this 1.6-million-strong city was considered a problem by 19 percent of the 800 people polled, overtaking unemployment and working conditions which came in at 12.4 percent and had since 2009 always been the top concern. 
 
 "This isn't a problem of 'tourist phobia,' people in Barcelona like to travel and appreciate people visiting," said Deputy Mayor Gerardo Pisarello. 
 
 "It's about a concrete malaise caused by overcrowding in certain districts." 
 
 Last year, nine million tourists spent at least one night in Barcelona's hotels. 
 
 But according to the city hall, this figure shoots up to 30 million if other rental options such as Airbnb lets are taken into account, as well as those who stay in the suburbs. 
 
 Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau, a former anti-eviction housing activist, has taken measures to try and ease the situation. 
 
 Authorities have banned the opening of new hotels in the centre and fined home rental platforms Airbnb and Homeaway €600,000 ($670,000) for marketing lodgings that lacked permits to host tourists. 
 
 However, tourism is one of the city's main engines for growth, generating 14 percent of its economic wealth and 65,000 direct jobs. ||||| Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Venetians have long complained of the big ships, and they are not alone 
 
 There are places where the surge of global tourism is starting to feel like a tidal wave. 
 
 Ancient cities around the shores of the Mediterranean and Adriatic are on the front line, their stone streets squeezed full of summer visitors as budget airlines and giant cruise ships unload ever-growing armies of tourists. 
 
 Take the Croatian city of Dubrovnik: a perfectly preserved historical miniature, carved from honey-coloured stone set in a sea of postcard blue. 
 
 Around 1,500 people live within the walls of its Old City, custodians of cultural treasures left by everyone from the Romans and the Ostrogoths to the Venetians and the Habsburgs. 
 
 Tourist takeover 
 
 On a busy day three modern cruise ships, each one the size of a floating apartment building, can disgorge five or six times that number of people into the city. 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Dubrovnik's allure for tourists has been amplified by Game of Thrones 
 
 They join the throngs of tourists staying in local hotels and in rooms rented over the internet, in streets where almost every elegant stone house has been converted into a B&B. 
 
 The overall effect is Disneylandish - a sense that you meet no-one but other tourists or ice-cream sellers, tour guides, waiters, reception clerks and buskers who are there to keep the tourist wheels turning. 
 
 Mark Thomas, who edits The Dubrovnik Times, explains the phenomenon like this. "When I first got here, I'd stand back if I saw that people were taking photographs of each other. Now there are so many people that I know if I did that, I'd never get anywhere here." 
 
 'Winter is coming' 
 
 Dubrovnik has a particular problem because its ancient appeal has now been bolstered by that most modern of phenomena - the HBO mini-series. The city, unchanged for centuries, provides the main locations for Game of Thrones. 
 
 Fans come on pilgrimages to visit the settings. One souvenir shop owner, who told me he doesn't watch the series himself, admitted he had Googled a couple of catchphrases to help attract customers. 
 
 "It does seem crazy," he admitted, "to stand here when it's 35 degrees, shouting that 'Winter is Coming'." 
 
 Image copyright Città di Capri Image caption The idyllic Italian island of Capri is buckling under the thousands of daily tourists 
 
 Dubrovnik is not alone in struggling to balance its need for tourists' money with the need to ensure that those tourists don't end up destroying the beauty they've come to see. 
 
 The tiny Italian island of Capri has warned that it could "explode" under the pressure of the trade that sees as many as 15,000 visitors a day travelling by boat from the mainland, to visit its once-idyllic streets and squares. 
 
 One local official told The Daily Telegraph: "You can't fit a litre-and-a-half into a litre pot." 
 
 Florence, Barcelona and some Greek islands like Santorini have suffered too, and it was perhaps Venice which experienced the problem first. Its population has been falling since the 1950s, effectively forced out by the hordes of cruise-ship visitors. 
 
 Why numbers are increasing 
 
 Tourism, of course, remains essentially a good thing and in the developed world we nearly all do it. 
 
 It means trade and cultural exchange and it's both a symbol of rising prosperity and a generator of future wealth. 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Not everyone in Barcelona is happy with the summer 'invasion' of tourists 
 
 Part of the "problem" is that travellers from traditional sources like the UK, Germany and the USA are increasingly being joined by the new middle classes of countries like Russia, China and India. 
 
 Add to that the issue of security, which means that many tourists feel safer in Europe than they do in alternative destinations like Tunisia, Turkey or Egypt, and it's hard to see the numbers falling any time soon. 
 
 It will fall to local governments in places like Dubrovnik and Capri and Venice to find a way of reducing those growing pressures. 
 
 For now, ideas like installing turnstiles on ancient squares and pedestrian traffic lights on crowded streets may sound rather fanciful. 
 
 But if that tourist tide keeps rising they might start to seem a little more tempting.
– It all started with Venice. The Italian port city on the Adriatic Sea has seen its population dwindle since the 1950s as locals are forced out by what the BBC calls "hordes of cruise-ship visitors." Nowadays, the problem of cruise ship tourist invasion has spilled over to many other ancient port cities, perhaps most notably Dubrovnik in Croatia on the other side of the Adriatic. Thanks in part to Game of Thrones being set there, five or six times the number of local residents (only 1,500 people live within the Old City) storm the gates every day in the summer. And that's not counting the thousands of tourists already staying in hotels and rentals; nearly all the city's stone houses are now devoted entirely to housing tourists. France24 reports that access to the Old City may soon be restricted. "When I first got here, I'd stand back if I saw that people were taking photographs of each other," says the editor of the Dubrovnik Times. "Now there are so many people that I know if I did that, I'd never get anywhere here." A local official chimes in that "you can't fit a liter-and-a-half into a liter pot." In Barcelona, per the Local, the situation has become so dire that more locals cite tourism as a problem than unemployment and working conditions. The deputy mayor says it's not "tourist phobia," but rather that, with some 30 million visitors spending at least one night in Barcelona last year, there's a "concrete malaise caused by overcrowding." Even in a more out-of-the-way destination like Iceland, tourists far outweigh the tiny local population. (Some say tourists are physically ruining Iceland.)