By Rachelle Wilson Tollemar, originally published by Resilience.org
In September 2025, I log into social media. My algorithm advertises a $137 Iberia Airlines flight from the US to Spain. The fare is crazy cheap. I can't even fly to visit my family within the continental US for $137. I know I'm not the only one whose hand is twitching to click.
But $137 is also conspicuously cheap. It is an obvious effort to keep encouraging international travel (and capital) in the turbulent contrails of a Spanish summer boiling hot with both a record number of foreign tourists and domestic-led anti-tourism movements. Sitting in the middle of this stand-off are these mass cheap flights, like those of Iberia, that are funding, fueling, and accelerating profound consequences on the peninsula.
My hand pauses at the tension. I wonder, what are the actual costs associated with cheap flights that promulgate mass tourism like those to Spain?
On the one hand, it is tempting to oversimplify the costs. Financially, I pay $137 and public and private subsidies likely pay the rest. Subsidies (and of course systematically underpaying airline workers) are critical for maintaining overheads low enough for cheap flights to keep taking off.
Environmentally, I also could comfortably rationalize that the carbon cost of one transatlantic flight, divided by hundreds of passengers, is quantifiably negligible in the context of tens of thousands of international flights happening on any given day. Spain alone captures a significant portion of these flights, on track to receive nearly 100 million international flyers by the end of 2025. This makes the environmental price of one flight from the US to Spain feel even less statistically significant. I am now seriously tempted.
And finally, any remaining questions, doubts, or calculations are easily jettisoned out the window when altruistic travelers, myself included, imagine themselves sipping coffees and eating tapas, envisioning their money supporting local economies. $137 really does seem to be a cheap deal -- and maybe even a good one all around.
Suddenly, all around the world twitching hands go calm. It is almost audible, the thousands of simultaneous clicks adding $137 to cart all at once.
Unfortunately, a more systematic analytical approach reveals how the costs of cheap flights, and thus mass tourism, are more complicated than appears.
Socio-economically, mass tourism in Spain has led to the further precarization of work. Seasonal, independent, contract, and short-term jobs are normalizing now more than ever to meet the deluge of demand from foreign travelers. While potentially unremarkable to workers from fully neoliberalized countries, like the United States, where precarious work has increasingly standardized horizontally and vertically, this situation is particularly problematic for Spain for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, while partially neoliberalized, Spain still operates as a social welfare state. When it comes to economics, the country constitutionally guarantees its citizens the right to work. In article 35 it declares that workers are entitled to dignified wages that satisfy one's needs and those of their families. Yet, the precarious work pervading local economies cannot fulfill this promise year-round as remuneration rollercoasters around, taking workers on a nauseating ride of unpredictable twists and turns. Unlike tourists, Spanish workers didn't sign up for this amusement.
Secondly, mass tourism generates profits that disproportionately push a few workers up and many down. Precarious work plays a critical role in this redistribution of wealth. Unstable new-age jobs dominating the tourism sector make it more difficult or even impossible for workers to access social welfare programs, like unemployment and housing assistance, which are traditionally designed for full-time, regular workers. So, tourism workers may do ok during the hot summer months; but when capital flows chill during the dead of winter, they now can freefall below their class line as they find themselves precluded from government support.
Further exasperating this vulnerability is that these workers must still pay their monthly rent and mortgages, which are now much higher thanks to the gobbling up of property by insatiable conglomerates, economic elites, and digital nomads (i.e., international gentrification) -- the real financial beneficiaries of the tourism boom. Considering this phenomenon, it may come as little surprise that homelessness and illegal occupation on the peninsula are on the rise, and so too are the number of millionaires and billionaires. Mass tourism funds inequality, not locals.
Culturally, locals complain of a "neoliberal invasion" of their communities and way of life. These kinds of tolls tend to be economically imperceptible, making them more difficult for a right-brain dominated society to quantify their significance.
At its core, the influx of international visitors has pushed the country to anglicize. This comes in many forms but concrete impacts include: the linguistic remodeling of signs to English; the pressure for businesses to remain open during traditional siesta hours; unaware tourists overtipping and potentially dragging in exploitative wage cultures to a people who have fought tooth and nail for labor rights; gawking at women who breastfeed uncovered in public; drinking to get wasted ("Ibiza!!"); complaining about gas prices in an infrastructure intentionally designed for people; talking unusually loud in non-regional languages within shared and closed spaces; traipsing around in athleisure or shorts in a notably more formal milieu; snapping Instagram photos in front of the Casa Batlló, effectively blocking the doors rather than entering them.
This stampeding on of the local, idiosyncratic way of life begs the question: are tourists coming to see the culture or to seize it? The anti-tourist movements resist the latter, the monoculturalization of their home, with their water guns and their incisive cri de coeur: #touristsgohome.
The environmental costs of mass tourism far exceed aerial carbon mathematics. For one, Spain has been exponentially increasing its resource usage in the last few decades - to a reckless degree. It is currently consuming more than three times its own territorial biocapacity. Overtourism only escalates Spain's socially dangerous and ecologically unsustainable posture.
The dystopic scene of April 28 exposed Spain's energetic crisis when its entire electrical grid failed and sent cascading darkness across various critical systems. The government and private firms are still sparring back and forth about who is to blame; meanwhile, many are calling for Spain to diversify its energy sources (despite already being maxed out on renewable and traditional energies, and heavily relying on foreign hydrocarbon imports) or to strengthen its grid. Interestingly, no official is decrying that the underlying problem might be the logic at play: that Spain is simply using too much energy - and the disproportionate number of people seasonally visiting its grid is likely compounding the stress.
Next, all countries are vulnerable to climate change in some way or another. Yet, mass tourism reflexively participates and perpetuates Spain's specific risks to the economic threats of a warming world. Of Spain's largest economic portfolio, the service sector, tourism accounts for a substantial portion. In addition to cheap flights, large swaths of foreign visitors are cabaceo'd in by a pleasant climate and a laid-back lifestyle (work to live, not live to work!). But will tourists still come when electricity is down, it's boiling hot, and there is no more cava to sip because all the grape crops died? Mass tourism threatens its own survivability.
Furthermore, mass tourism invites over and/or maldevelopment. A wave of recently released graphic novels lament how Spain's plazas and parks - the alluring "third spaces" quintessential of the country-- are being bulldozed and replaced with retail and multinational capitalism. What once was an orange tree could now be a Mango; what once was an apartment building could now house corporate offices. Urban places that were invaluable and widely accessible suddenly dangle a definitive price tag or require a badge for entry.
Beyond cities, other more rural vistas are also being consumed by hotels, housing, and restaurants in a hungry rush to insatiably grow tourism into more of the country. On top of obstructed and littered views, maldevelopments displace wildlife and reconstitute life-filled ecologies with artificial environments. In fact, an article published in Nature in 2020 found that human-made mass ("anthropogenic mass") will very soon, if it has not already, surpass all global living biomass on the planet. Mass tourism terraforms earth.
Earth's current geological epoch is called the Holocene, an era characterized by human and nonhuman flourishing. But given the recent mass extinction, overall ecological decline, and surging socio-economic inequality, clearly, life is no longer flourishing.
One popular proposal for a new epochal appellation is called the Plantationocene. The Plantationocene emphasizes how large-scale extractive systems (like the industrial monocropping of soy, corn, sugar, coffee, etc.) are transforming earth through toxic dynamics of colonization, imperialism, and forced labor. As a system, plantations settle into a foreign place, extract resources, deplete the soil, and then leave behind a barrenness that threatens future generation's ecological, social, and financial prosperity.
I see mass tourism like a plantation. It flies around the world, jumping from one trendy place to the next, injecting nonnative dynamics into the foreign land, and departing only once the locale has been totally depleted and/or totally transformed.
Think about it. Currently in vogue - and in danger -- are cities like Barcelona, Tokyo, Paris and Mexico City. Before them were hot spots now turned sores like Patagonia in 2023 (suffering from rodent infestations, infrastructure woes, and surging prices), Porto in 2022 (undergoing de-historicization of its city center), Maya Bay of Thailand in 2018 (closed for subsequent years for ecological recovery ), small southern Icelandic towns in 2016 (smelling of sewage due to the excessive waste proliferation from visitors en masse), Riviera Maya in 2011 (where wastewater spews straight into the sea, eroding and contaminating the "paradisical" Caribbean beaches), Venice in 2010 (whose increasingly toxic waters led to cruise ships being banned)... and so many others. Cheap flights function like a tailwind behind all this ecological decline, accelerating it at an unmanageable speed.
The end of the Plantationocene era can only come through extinction: either through our own end or through ending our harmful activities. Similarly, mass tourism poses the same existential threat: does it only end once everywhere has been trendified and destroyed? Or does it end with us putting an end to our behavior?
Spain has attempted to curb overtourism, albeit to little effect. Regulatory difficulties provoke a deeper, philosophical conundrum: should travel be cheap?
Environmental humanities researchers Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore theorize that the modern world has been (de)constructed by seven systems of cheapness: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. Contrary to common capitalist thought, Patel and Moore challenge that "cheapness" is not a deal nor a desirable bargain; it is a pervasive weapon of devaluation that externalizes its consequences to maintain profits- at steep socio-ecological costs.
Viewing mass tourism within this backdrop of degrading environments, cultures, and economic equality helps us all to critically understand that there is no such thing as a cheap flight. Someone, something, somewhere is paying for it.
In my view, it is time to reconsider how travel is embarked on, to whom, for how many, and why.