Nice and Barcelona – looking to the sea

Although Nice and Barcelona share a coastal position on the Mediterranean, at first sight they seem to share little else. Nice has a population of 350,000 in its conurbation, and since the 19th century has been offering tourists the benefits of its gentle way of life. The other, with a population of almost 5 million, is a world-class metropolis with a dynamic economy. While tourism is its main source of revenue, its port also plays a key role in its economy, thanks to passenger and freight transport.

Nice, Barcelona, sharing culture and tourism

In Nice, as in Barcelona, culture lives and breathes. In Barcelona, you can wander through the narrow streets of Barrì Gottic, the city’s Gothic quarter, a veritable labyrinth of buildings dating back to the Middle Ages. Climb up to the Parque Güell, visit the famous villas designed by the city’s emblematic architect, Antoni Gaudí, and wander around the Miró Foundation and the Picasso Museum. In Nice, it’s not just the carnival that makes the city shine every year in May, but also top-notch cultural centres and collections, such as the Chagall and Matisse museums. Old Nice, the legacy of 19th-century luxury tourism, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as are the buildings designed by Gaudí in the Catalan capital.

Both cities are major tourist attractions in Europe. In 2023, Barcelona welcomed 36.4 million overnight stays for a population of 5 million, and Nice more than 6 million. To the point where their residents are beginning to suffer some negative effects.

Overtourism: when local residents voice their concerns

Every weekend, the streets of Vieux Nice resound to the sound of the wheels of tourists’ suitcases as they head off to their Airbnb. Since 2017, the town hall has been trying to impose safeguards on this fast-growing market by introducing quotas for tourist rentals per district and requiring owners to seek authorisation before renting out their accommodation. In Barcelona in 2024, around 3,000 residents, members of residents’ associations, took to the streets to demonstrate against the effects of overtourism, even spraying water at visitors they met along the way. The town council has announced that it wants to ban furnished tourist accommodation by 2028, but is encountering opposition from property owners.

For the moment, in both cities, overtourism is having a definite impact on property prices, although it is not the only culprit. The price of a square metre in Barcelona almost doubled in 10 years, between 2014 and 2023, and Nice is the only city in France where prices have not fallen in 2024, with a significant effect on the difficulty of finding accommodation for local residents, which is holding back the region’s economic development.

Two cities, one challenge in the face of global warming

The Catalan capital has always been characterised by its proactive and innovative urban planning. From the 19th century onwards, the city was built and developed according to a grid plan, the Plan Cerdà, named after the town planner Ildefons Cerdà, who devised this new, regular structure to improve the quality of life of residents and facilitate mobility. Today, the city is developing ‘super-islets’, a contemporary adaptation of the original plan, which group together several Cerdà blocks. Within these zones, traffic is almost entirely pedestrianised and the areas are planted with vegetation to improve air quality and combat global warming.

‘The city of Barcelona is much further ahead than Nice in its fight against climate change, because it can already see the effects. Super-islands are an opportunity to rethink public space,’ explains Eliesh Sahyoun, architect and futurologist at the IMREDD^[1] (Mediterranean Institute for Environmental Risk and Sustainable Development at the Université Côte d’Azur), as part of the UX for smart life chair.

Nice has been implementing green initiatives since 2021, planting trees in the heart of the city, and has introduced a Territorial Climate, Air and Energy Plan (PCAET), which runs until 2025 and aims to reduce the use of fossil-fuelled cars and improve the energy efficiency of buildings in particular.

[^1] IMREDD – Institute of Innovation and Partnerships of the Université Côte d’Azur

Water, at the heart of tomorrow’s challenges

Both cities look to the sea. In Nice, urban development has organically followed the coastline, while in Barcelona, the 1992 Olympic Games returned the sea to its inhabitants, by rehabilitating or creating 5 kilometres of beach and creating a vast leisure area, the Olympic port. However, for Eliesh Sahyoun, ‘the most pressing challenge facing the two conurbations in the coming years is the lack of water’. They are already regularly affected by drought. Barcelona has one of the world’s largest desalination plants, and has announced the construction of a floating station, but both cities will have to find ways of combating this shortage in the future.

‘Barcelona is an international city that has lost its identity’

Although Barcelona is a world-class tourist destination and some of its residents have resisted the constant influx of tourists, the city has retained a strong Catalan identity. Catalan is the city’s co-official language with Spanish, and all signage is written in both languages. Numerous Catalan celebrations punctuate the cultural calendar, including the Diada, the Catalan national festival, and the Castells (human towers listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site). The regional identity is strongly asserted by its inhabitants, Barcelona being a centre of the nationalist movement. It is not uncommon to see Catalan flags on balconies.