Just take a walk through Malaga to come across dozens of little blue signs with two letters, “AT”. That is, “tourist apartments”. This has been the case for a long time, but in recent years tourist pressure has become increasingly intense.
Perhaps that is why, on almost every AT sign, you can see stickers that say “Before this was my house”, “Mayor Your Muerto”, “A Tu puta casa”, “ApesTando a tourist”. And it is interesting to look at them because they are a very precise x-ray of how the same problem is channeled in completely different ways.
That distinction has been written for 230 years and the nuance marks everything.
When Kant kicked out all the tourists Konigsberg. Anyone who knows anything about Kant will know that he was not exactly a revolutionary. The German philosopher barely left his city on the shores of the Baltic and, in fact, was famous for following a routine so exact that neighbors could adjust the clock time with their walks.
Of course, he didn’t have the blood in his veins to throw anyone out of Königsberg. However, in ‘On Perpetual Peace’ (1795) he developed an idea that, brought to our days, can help us understand the limits of tourism: that of hospitality.
Hospitality? Yes and, believe me, it is a slippery concept. Historically, this same concept served the theorists of the School of Salamanca to justify the conquest of America and Kant to drive people out of his city. The devil, as always, is in the details.
After all, any philosophically developed concept of hospitality focuses on limits: it focuses on recognizing that the stranger has the right not to be treated with hostility as long as he comes in peace. That is, you have the right to visit, to sightsee in our cities.
But (and here is the heart of the artichoke) what you do not have the right to do is to rearrange the site to your liking. Kant uses the idea of ’inhospitable conduct’ to condemn the Western powers: ‘visiting’ or ‘trading’ meant for them to treat the lands as if they had no owner and its inhabitants as ‘nothing’. ‘Hospitality’ cannot become a way of remaking the place you arrive at to your advantage.
And why are we interested in this? Because Spain Spain broke its record in 2024: 93.8 million international tourists, 10.1% more than the previous year. In July 2025 alone, 11 million people arrived. That pressure is changing cities to serve tourism.
But is that wrong…? To understand the contemporary nuances, it is worth bringing up the philosopher Lea Ypi and her update of the Kantian concept of colonialism. In his work on this topic, Ypi points out that the problem is not the origin of the visitor, nor that the natives have a kind of ‘ownership’ over the territory: the problem is the dynamics that deny the locals a relationship of equals with the visitors.
That is to say, touristification is not bad because it fills cities with foreign tourists, but because it is a phenomenon that, taking refuge in lack of definition, reorganizes the city for the benefit of outsiders and, along the way, expels those who live in it.
The moral problem is not the immigrant or ‘expat’ who arrives in a community and integrates into it to strengthen it; The problem is that it erodes it and puts it at its service (even if it is not with armies and cannons, even if it is with an asymmetry in economic relations). As theorist Margaret Moore recalls, “residents” are defined by having a life linked to a place, not by having been born there (or having property there).
The unfaithful trustee. Because yes, in many cases this touristification is only possible thanks to the necessary collaboration of many ‘natives’ who are enriched by it. However, that argument often forgets that, although these people have concrete property rights that they are entitled to exploit, they also have a fiduciary responsibility for the common good.
The owners who indiscriminately put groups of tourists into neighboring communities until they become uninhabitable are not exercising their right, they are ignoring their responsibilities towards the community of owners and the city in which they carry out this activity.
That is, it’s not the who, it’s the what.
The distinction is fragile, it is true. But it is useful to understand “what is wrong” with touristification. And for something written over 200 years ago by a very troubled guy from Königsberg (who, as far as we know, has never set foot on a beach) it’s not bad at all.
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