A group of tourists were sitting at an outdoor table in the Spanish city of Barcelona, trying to enjoy their drinks, when a woman raised a cheap plastic water gun and shot an arc of water at them.
Her weapon of choice — the cheap, squirt-squirt variety — is an increasingly common fixture at anti-tourism protests in the southern European country, where many locals fear that an overload of visitors is driving them from their cherished neighborhoods.
But how did the humble water gun become a symbol of discontent?
Photo: AP
REFRESHING TO REVOLUTIONARY
The phenomenon started last July, when a fringe, left-wing activist group based in Barcelona that promotes the “degrowth” of the city’s successful tourism sector held its first successful rally. Some brought water guns to shoot one another and stay cool in the summer heat.
“What happened later went viral, but in reality it was just kind of a joke by a group of people who brought water guns because it was hot,” Adriana Coten, one of the organizers of Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth, said.
Then, some turned their water guns from each other to tourists. The images went around the world, becoming a publicity coup for the anti-tourism cause.
The guns reappeared in April when the same group stopped a tour bus in Barcelona, the Catalan capital.
GUNS DRAWN
On Sunday, around a thousand people marched from a luxury shopping boulevard popular with affluent foreigners before police stopped them from getting closer to Barcelona’s top sightseeing destination: La Sagrada Familia church.
The marchers spritzed unsuspecting tourists along the way, chanting slogans and carrying protest signs. One read: “One more tourist, one less resident!”
They left a trail of stickers on hotel doors, lampposts and outdoor cafe tables showing a squirting water gun encircled by a message in English: “Tourist Go Home!”
Still, the number of Barcelona protesters carrying water guns was a minority — and in the gun-toting group, many were only shooting in the air or at each other. One dad was toting his baby in a front-pack, water gun in hand.
Outside the protests, Barcelona locals are not toting water guns or taking aim at tourists. And many in the city still support tourism, which is a pillar of the local economy.
A SYMBOL
Can the water gun really change the minds of tourists, authorities or the businesses that drive the industry? Depends on who you ask.
Protester Lourdes Sanchez and her teenage daughter, each holding a water gun, said the gun “really isn’t to hurt anyone.”
“This is a symbol to say that we are fed up of how [the] tourism industry is transforming our country into a theme park,” Sanchez said.
Another demonstrator, Andreu Martinez, acknowledged it was “to bother the tourists a bit.”
Laurens Schocher, a 46-year-old architect, said he didn’t shoot any suspected tourists but hoped that carrying a water gun would bring more attention to their cause.
“I don’t think the tourists will get it,” he said. “I think this is to send a message to [the] authorities.”
The marchers had no monster, pump-action water cannons most kids use for backyard battles in the summer. Theirs were the old-school, cheap-o water guns that send a slim jet of w ater not that far away.
Some tourists who were sprayed took it in stride, even claiming it was refreshing on a day with temperatures pushing up to around 30 degrees Celsius.
But there were moments of tension. When several marchers squirted workers at a large hostel, tempers flared and one worker spat at his attackers as he slammed the hostel door shut.
Nora Tsai, who had just arrived from Taiwan on a short visit, was among those spritzed on Sunday. She said she was a bit frightened and saddened. The “Tourist go home!” chants didn’t help either.
“I still like Barcelona,” she said. “I have met a lot of people who were kind.”
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS