Barcelona's José Antonio Donaire leads tourism clampdown

José Antonio Donaire, Barcelona’s commissioner for sustainable tourism management, is emerging as the public face of the city’s latest effort to tighten control over tourism in its most crowded districts. A May 18 Guardian feature cast Donaire as the official tasked with helping “take Barcelona back” from overtourism, while city hall documents show his remit already includes managing high-visitor areas, illegal activity and the use of tourist-tax revenue. Mayor Jaume Collboni created the post in 2025 as Barcelona shifted, in the city’s words, from promoting tourism to managing it. The pressure point is not tourism’s economic role alone, but how visitor flows are concentrated around places such as La Rambla and the Boqueria market. ### Who is José Antonio Donaire, and what job was he given? June 23, 2025 is the date Barcelona city hall announced Donaire’s appointment as commissioner for sustainable tourism management, a newly created role under Collboni’s administration. The city said Donaire, a geography professor and tourism specialist, was hired to reinforce the government’s 2024-2027 tourism-management plan and support Deputy Mayor Jordi Valls on measures including coach mobility rules, cruise-terminal negotiations and tourist-tax policy. (ajuntament.barcelona.cat) Jaume Collboni said at the time that Donaire would help drive a “paradigm shift” from tourism promotion to tourism management. Catalan News, reporting from the city’s June 20, 2025 presentation, quoted Collboni saying Barcelona wanted to “manage the tourism industry” under a more sustainable model and quoted Donaire saying the city had “reached its growth limit.” (ajuntament.barcelona.cat) ### Why is the Boqueria market at the center of this story? October 1, 2024 is when Barcelona city hall set out a reform plan for the Boqueria market as part of its Management Plan for High Affluence Spaces, known by the Catalan acronym EGA. The city described the overhaul as an effort to preserve the market’s local function while balancing daily commercial activity with heavy visitor traffic. (ajuntament.barcelona.cat) The Boqueria recorded 23,273,738 visitors in 2023, according to the city, making it the most visited market in Barcelona’s municipal network. City hall said the site had 178 establishments and had already been subject to restrictions on organized groups of 15 or more visitors on Fridays and Saturdays from April to October, alongside a larger civic-agent presence. (ajuntament.barcelona.cat) ### What powers does Donaire have over tourist hotspots? Barcelona city hall said Donaire’s mandate includes improving the temporal and spatial distribution of visitors through the rollout of the high-visitor-areas management plan. The same mandate includes tackling illegal business activity, coordinating policy across government and channeling tourist-tax revenue toward measures meant to improve residents’ living conditions. (ajuntament.barcelona.cat) April 8, 2026 is when the city’s press office publicized a Barcelona discussion featuring Donaire on “the present and future of tourism” at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. The event notice identified him as the commissioner for sustainable tourism management, underscoring that the post remained active as the city’s tourism debate moved from protest slogans to implementation details. (ajuntament.barcelona.cat) ### How big is the tourism flow Barcelona is trying to manage? March 12, 2026 is when Barcelona said the city and surrounding region ended 2025 with 26.1 million visitors and 14.041 billion euros in direct tourism spending. Of that total, the city of Barcelona alone received 16 million visitors in 2025, up 2.9% from 2024, according to the Barcelona Tourism Observatory and city hall. (ajuntament.barcelona.cat) Those figures help explain why officials are focusing on concentration rather than only aggregate visitor counts. City documents describe the goal as redistributing tourism across time and space, while the Boqueria and nearby central districts remain test cases for how that policy works on the ground. (ajuntament.barcelona.cat) ### What other measures are moving alongside the hotspot crackdown? Barcelona said in 2025 that Donaire would work as the city finalized its tourist-coach mobility bylaw, negotiated with the port to reduce cruise terminals and sought to maximize tourist-tax resources. The same announcement linked his appointment to the planned phaseout of licences for tourist-use accommodations by 2028, which Collboni described as one of the administration’s tougher tourism decisions. (ajuntament.barcelona.cat) By 2028, Barcelona plans to let tourist-use accommodation licences expire, while the city continues implementing the 2024-2027 tourism-management measure and the high-affluence-spaces plan. Donaire and Collboni remain the named officials attached to those next steps in the city’s published tourism agenda. (ajuntament.barcelona.cat)