There was a time when overtourism sounded like somebody else’s problem.

It was the kind of thing you read about in a summer headline next to a photo of a packed square in Barcelona, a cruise-ship crowd in Venice, or a protest sign in Lisbon. It felt like a tourism story. Too many visitors. Too many selfie sticks. Too many bachelor parties. Too many short-term rentals. Too many people treating a real city like a themed backdrop for a weekend.

But in 2026, that framing is too small.

Because overtourism is no longer just a tourist issue. It is becoming an expat issue, a digital nomad issue, a long-stay issue, a housing issue, and in some places, a mood issue. The tension is no longer only about whether residents want fewer cruise passengers or fewer drunken weekenders. It is about who gets to live in a city, who gets priced out of it, what happens when housing is converted into short-term inventory, and how locals start to feel when “international demand” becomes the background explanation for every rent increase and every neighborhood change.

That matters for Passport readers because a lot of the places expats and nomads love most are exactly the places feeling this pressure hardest.

The old expat fantasy was simple: find a great city, settle in, enjoy the better weather, better food, better walkability, better lifestyle, and maybe even lower cost of living. But now, in a growing number of destinations, the local conversation has shifted. Residents are less interested in whether you are a tourist or a nomad in the flattering self-description sense. They care whether you are part of the wider pressure on housing, noise, neighborhoods, and everyday life. That is a much different emotional climate than the one many expats imagined when they first started looking abroad.

And that is really the story here.

Overtourism used to be about crowds.
Now it is increasingly about legitimacy.

You can see it in the policy changes, but you can also feel it in the tone.

Across southern Europe especially, coordinated anti-tourism protests gained momentum in 2025, with demonstrations in Spain, Portugal, and Italy focused on overcrowding, rising housing costs, low-quality tourism jobs, and the broader sense that residents are being asked to absorb the downsides of visitor economies while getting less and less of the upside. Reuters reported coordinated actions in places including Barcelona, Venice, and Lisbon, and follow-up protests again highlighted housing pressure and neighborhood fatigue as central complaints.

That matters because once the public conversation moves from “tourism is annoying” to “tourism is reshaping daily life against residents’ interests,” everyone associated with the international-mobility ecosystem starts getting folded into the same emotional category.

That does not mean locals see a one-week cruise passenger and a three-year foreign resident as identical. Of course they do not. But it does mean the warm social distinction many expats assumed would protect them is not always as strong as they think. In pressured cities, locals are often responding to systems, not biographies. If housing is tightening, short-term rentals are everywhere, and neighborhoods are changing faster than local wages can support, foreigners with remote incomes can end up symbolizing those pressures even if individually they are polite, culturally curious, and trying their best. That is not always fair, but it is very understandable.

And once you understand that, the policy changes happening across Europe start to make more sense.

If there is one issue driving the emotional intensity of the overtourism debate, it is housing.

Barcelona is the cleanest example. Reuters reported that the city plans to end all permits for tourist apartments by 2028, while Spain’s broader crackdown has also included orders to remove tens of thousands of allegedly non-compliant Airbnb listings. AP likewise reported Barcelona’s plan not to renew tourist apartment licenses after they expire, tying the move directly to housing pressure and livability concerns. Spain’s economy minister has also explicitly linked overtourism concerns to a housing crisis marked by surging rents in cities like Barcelona and Madrid.

That is not a symbolic fight.
That is a direct fight over residential supply.

And once a city begins treating short-term rentals as part of a housing emergency rather than a quirky side effect of travel, the whole social climate changes. The question stops being, “How many visitors can we attract?” and becomes, “How many homes are we losing?” or “Who is this city actually for?” That is a much harder conversation for expats, especially those who have built a lifestyle around furnished medium-term stays, flexible relocation, or Airbnb-to-Airbnb mobility without really thinking about how that market looks from the resident side.

Lisbon fits this pattern too. Reuters reported that Lisbon moved closer to a vote on a short-term-rental ban that could affect around 20,000 holiday rentals, while noting that rents in the city had more than doubled over the previous decade. Whatever one thinks about the best policy response, the political message is unmistakable: housing pressure and tourism pressure are now being debated together, not separately.

And once housing enters the story, the expat conversation changes immediately.

Because the uncomfortable truth is that many expats and digital nomads are not just “visitors who stay longer.” They are also demand.

Another big change is that many cities are no longer treating tourism growth as an unquestioned good.

Venice’s day-tripper fee is one of the clearest examples. AP reported that Venice expanded the fee for non-overnight visitors in 2025, while Reuters noted the city broadened the number of fee days and increased prices for late bookings as part of its effort to control pressure on the historic center. Residents, notably, have protested not because they oppose all tourism, but because they do not want Venice turned into a theme park detached from normal urban life.

That is an important distinction.

The new mood in many destinations is not “no foreigners allowed.” It is “we are tired of being optimized only for visitors.” That is a much more sophisticated complaint. It is about the conversion of living cities into consumption zones, where housing becomes hospitality stock, restaurants become content-friendly but culturally thinner, local rhythms get displaced by visitor rhythms, and the cost of being a resident keeps rising.

Amsterdam has been moving in this direction for years. The city has already used “stay away” messaging, nightlife restrictions, and short-term-rental limits as part of a wider anti-overtourism strategy, and reporting in late 2025 indicated that Amsterdam intended to cut legal holiday rentals from 30 nights to 15 nights in several neighborhoods. Even where proposals are still filtering through politics and implementation, the direction is obvious: cities are becoming more restrictive, more selective, and more willing to regulate tourism-linked housing supply.

That is not anti-travel.
It is destination management.

But if you are an expat or nomad, destination management can absolutely end up managing you too.

For years, expats enjoyed a kind of reputational insulation.

Tourists were seen as shallow and temporary.
Expats were seen as integrated and intentional.

Tourists took photos.
Expats built lives.

That distinction still exists, but it is weakening in places under pressure.

Why? Because from the resident perspective, several categories can create similar effects even when their self-image is different. A weekend tourist, a remote worker on a six-month stay, an investor running short-term rentals, and a high-income newcomer taking a furnished apartment are not the same social actor. But they can all feed the same housing ecosystem, the same neighborhood turnover, and the same feeling that the city is becoming less accessible to locals. Studies and policy work at the EU level increasingly focus on short-term rentals as a structural housing issue, not just a tourism issue, and they explicitly connect platformized accommodation growth to access and affordability problems.

That is why overtourism is becoming an expat issue.

Because the local frustration is often not really about whether you identify as a traveler, resident, nomad, or immigrant. It is about whether your presence participates in a system that is making the city harder to live in for the people already there.

And if you are honest, that is not a crazy question.

There is another layer here that people do not always say out loud.

Some of the older expat script now sounds tone-deaf in these environments.

The script goes something like this:
“This place is still affordable.”
“You can live like a king here.”
“Rent is so cheap.”
“It is such a hidden gem.”

That language already felt clumsy in many parts of Latin America. In pressured European cities, it can sound even worse. Not because enjoying a better quality of life abroad is wrong, but because talking about affordability without asking for whom starts to sound careless in destinations where locals are already angry about being priced out.

This is where I think expats and nomads need to update their self-understanding a little.

You may not be “the problem.” But you are not outside the system either.

If you arrive with a foreign income into a market under strain, you are participating in that market. If you rely on furnished short-term stock in a city actively trying to reclaim housing for residents, that matters. If you choose destinations mainly because they are “cheap for you,” while the local conversation is about displacement, that gap in perspective will eventually catch up with you.

The point is not guilt.
The point is accuracy.

The answer is not “stop moving abroad.”

It is “move abroad with more awareness.”

First, understand the local housing conversation before you choose a destination. If a city is actively fighting over short-term rentals, capping licenses, or treating tourism as a housing issue, do not act surprised when residents have less patience for glib outsider enthusiasm.

Second, be more thoughtful about the accommodation ecosystem you rely on. In some places, a long-term lease in a normal residential framework creates a different social footprint than rotating through premium short-term stock in the city center. That will not solve everything, but it changes your relationship to the place.

Third, retire the “hidden gem” language. If a place is already protesting tourism, it is not hidden. And if locals are exhausted, acting like you discovered an affordable paradise is not just inaccurate, it is socially clumsy.

Fourth, widen your map. One reason overtourism gets so intense is that demand concentrates in a small number of globally validated neighborhoods and cities. Some of the healthiest expat decisions in 2026 may involve choosing the second-city, the off-core neighborhood, or the place that still wants residents more than it wants spectacle.

And finally, remember that respect is not just interpersonal. It is structural. Being kind to locals matters. Learning some language matters. Spending locally matters. But so does understanding whether your lifestyle is leaning on exactly the housing and neighborhood systems residents are trying to protect.

What is happening right now is bigger than tourism.

Cities are renegotiating who they are for.

That is the real story.

Barcelona is asking whether its housing should serve residents or visitors first. Venice is asking how much day-tripper volume a fragile historic city can absorb before it stops feeling like a city at all. Amsterdam is asking how much neighborhood life it is willing to trade away for platform rental activity. Lisbon has been wrestling with exactly the same tension. And Europe’s institutions are now looking more seriously at short-term rentals as part of a continent-wide housing question.

Expats are not outside that shift.

They are inside it.

And the people who will adapt best are the ones who stop thinking like the older generation of lifestyle migrants, who often treated local affordability as a permanent feature rather than a contested one.

The new reality is sharper than that.

A great expat destination is no longer just a place that feels good to you.
It is also a place where your presence still fits the local social contract.

That matters more now than it used to.

Overtourism is becoming an expat issue because the line between visitor pressure and resident pressure is getting harder to separate.

When housing becomes tourism stock, when neighborhoods become brandable, when local life becomes secondary to global demand, the people who move abroad for a better lifestyle get folded into the same debate as the people arriving for a weekend.

Sometimes that is unfair.
Sometimes it is absolutely accurate.
Usually it is a mix of both.

But either way, the mood is changing.

And smart expats will change with it.

Not by disappearing.
Not by apologizing for existing.
But by becoming more precise about where they go, how they live, what systems they support, and whether the cities they love still feel like places asking for residents — or places begging for relief.

That is the overtourism conversation now.

And if you are planning a move abroad in 2026, it is your conversation too.