Cruise travelers calling at Barcelona should expect to pay more from now on, after the city’s mayor moved to double the local tourist levy with immediate effect.
Under the change, cruise passengers who stop in the Catalan capital will be charged 8 euros per person, per day (about $9.32). The increase is part of a broader effort to curb cruise visits—ideally reducing them to zero unless Barcelona is the first or last port on a passenger’s itinerary.
Although the fee remains relatively small, it represents a sharp jump from the previous 4-euro rate and could add up quickly for groups—for instance, a family of four could be paying close to $40 per day during a stopover.
“In the coming months, we will increase the tourist tax from four to eight euros ($9.32) [per person per day] so that it comes into effect in the coming months and not in four years as we had agreed,”said the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, per Spanish newspaper El Pais.
The initial idea was to phase the rise in gradually, stepping the tax up over the next four years until it reached 8 euros ahead of 2030.
But as of May 13, Collboni signaled he no longer wants to wait for a slow rollout, opting instead for a single, immediate hike.
“I want to discourage cruise ship passengers from coming to Barcelona,” he said, per the outlet.
“Tourism must serve the city, not the other way around. We want quality tourism, which is why we are renovating the Fira de Barcelona; we are interested in business visitors,” he says of Barcelona’s convention center. “What we don’t want is tourist overcrowding.”
Tourism remains central to the city’s economy, accounting for roughly 14% of Barcelona’s GDP and supporting more than 150,000 jobs.
Even so, many residents have grown increasingly fed up with the sheer volume of visitors and the knock-on effects, including crowded streets and rising housing costs.
Those frustrations boiled over in 2024, when demonstrations took aim at overtourism and some locals even doused visitors with water guns as a sign of protest.
Visitors may also face higher costs beyond cruise stopovers. According to Reuters, the Catalonian government has approved legislation that would double the tourist tax for vacation rental guests, raising the cap to 12.5 euros ($14.57) per night from the previous 6.25 euros.
Authorities are also planning to prohibit all short-term holiday rentals from 2028, meaning only traditional hotels and established accommodations would be allowed to host travelers as part of this wider clampdown.
Hotel guests, however, are not exempt from higher charges: nightly taxes are also set to rise, with rates moving to between 10 and 15 euros per night, compared with the former 5 to 7.5 euro range.