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TRAVEL NEWS

Do Brits in Spain still have to quarantine on return to the UK?

The British government on Thursday July 8th announced a relaxation of its quarantine rules for fully vaccinated travellers, however this does not include Brits who live abroad.

Published: 8 July 2021 16:02 CEST
Do Brits in Spain still have to quarantine on return to the UK?
Do Brits in Spain still have to quarantine on return to the UK? Photo: Ben FATHERS / AFP

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps announced on Thursday that from July 19th, fully vaccinated Brits visiting amber list countries, including Spain, would no longer have to quarantine on arrival back in the UK.

However this exemption is not extended to the majority of UK nationals who live in Spain, who will still have to quarantine when visiting friends or family in the UK, even if they are fully vaccinated.

Shapps said that the new changes would “prioritise those vaccinated in the United Kingdom” and are for “residents returning to England”.

The Department for Transport confirmed to The Local that this exemption is for anyone who was vaccinated in the UK or part of a UK clinical trial on vaccines.

This means that British residents living in Spain who received their vaccinations in the UK can travel quarantine-free, but the majority who got their Covid jabs in Spain will still have to undergo a 10-day quarantine if they want to travel to the UK to visit friends and family. They will also have to still pay around £160 for the compulsory travel testing package.

Speaking on Sky News on Friday morning, Shapps said he hoped to be able to have news to announced on whether the UK can recognise people vaccinated in other countries “within the next couple of weeks”.

Essentially, those vaccinated in the UK, will be able to visit family members resident in Spain, without the need to quarantine upon return, however those same family members will not be able to visit relatives back in the UK without the need for quarantine.

Founder and CEO of The Local James Savage expressed his anger at this on Twitter when he said: “People who the UK will let in without quarantining: 1) Italians who want to watch football. 2) Brits returning from a fortnight in Shagaluf. People the UK refuses to admit w/o quarantine: 1) Fully vaccinated Brits living in the EU who haven’t seen their families for a year”. 

Many other British residents in the EU have taken to Twitter to express their anger at the new change which does not include British citizens vaccinated abroad. One said: “I was really hoping that we could all go to the UK this summer and not have the cost of all the tests plus the 10-day quarantine. This truly is heartbreaking….” while another Tweeted: “I live in Spain… What about the 100s of 1000s of Brits in Spain who might want to visit family and friends?”. 

Shapps explained: “We want to welcome international visitors back to the UK and are working to extend our approach to vaccinated passengers from important markets and holiday destinations later this summer, such as the United States and the EU”.

A source from the European Commission told The Local “When it comes to the UK, the talks are ongoing at the technical level and are progressing well and going in the right direction. This is in particular because technically speaking the EU’s and the UK’s architectures are aligned”.

Currently, those vaccinated in Spain can make travel easier to anywhere within the EU or Schengen Area by downloading their Digital Covid Certificate to prove they’ve been fully vaccinated, tested or have recovered from Covid. 

READ ALSO: How to get a Digital Covid Certificate for travel from Spain to the EU

The UK is not currently part of the EU-wide scheme, but talks are ongoing to allow non-EU countries such as the UK and USA to join for mutual recognition of the certificates.

READ ALSO – REMINDER: Everything Brits need to know about travel to Spain under new rules in July 2021

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For members

TOURISM

Ecotax and cruise bans: Why Spain’s mass tourism measures haven’t worked

Regions and cities around Spain have tried several ways to slow down the negative effects of mass tourism on local communities, largely without any luck and not addressing the major problem underpinning it.

Published: 3 May 2024 09:27 CEST
Ecotax and cruise bans: Why Spain's mass tourism measures haven't worked

The Spanish tourism sector continues to grow, but so does opposition to it.

Increasingly in Spain in recent years, anti-tourist sentiment (sometimes veering into anti-digital nomad sentiment) is on the rise, and much of it is born from frustrations about mass tourism and gentrification and their impact on Spaniards.

READ ALSO: Why does hatred of tourists in Spain appear to be on the rise?

In 2000, 46.4 million tourists visited Spain. In those days, travellers (often from Northern Europe) flocked to the coasts to stay in the hotel blocks right on the beach. The classic Spanish holiday, if you will.

But things are changing. By 2023, that figure had nearly doubled to 85.3 million.

Yet during those 23 years hotel accommodation grew by just 7 percent. This statistic, cited by Juan Molas, President of Spain’s Tourist Board and cited in Spanish daily El País, reveals a lot about the Spanish tourism sector and why efforts to try and combat mass tourism (or its negative effects, at least) have failed so far.

Molas’ statistic begs an obvious question: where do the rest of those tourists now stay, if not in traditional hotels?

Increasingly, in short-term accommodation such as tourist rentals and, in recent years, Airbnbs.

READ MORE: ‘Get the f*ck out of here’ – Málaga plastered with anti-tourism stickers

There have been regular protests against mass tourism around Spain in recent months, notably in places like the Canary Islands and Málaga.

Anti-tourist graffiti has appeared in places such as Barcelona, Valencia, Granada, the Canary and Balearic Islands, places that face the brunt of mass tourism in Spain. Locals complain that the proliferation of tourist rental accommodation depletes the affordable housing stock, inflates the local property market, and prices them out of their own neighbourhoods.

Often, these sorts of tourist rental accommodations are unlicensed and illegal. In Madrid, for example, there are tens of thousands of tourist apartments in Madrid available through platforms such as Airbnb and Booking, and yet recent findings show that barely five percent have a municipal tourist licence in order to operate legally. 

“Neither the central administration, nor the regions, nor the town councils have done their homework on the illegal [accommodation] offer, which is the most important scourge of tourism in Spain,” Molas says.

Though the problem seems obvious to many, including experts like Molas, some regions of Spain have focused on other ways to try and limit mass tourism… and they haven’t really worked so far.

READ ALSO:

Tourist tax

Tourist taxes made big news in recent weeks when Venice began charging tourists on day trips to visit the tourist hotspot.

In Spain, Catalonia and the Balearic Islands are the only two regions that have implemented tourist taxes so far, although not with the express aim of reducing the number of visitors.

Rather, Catalonia taxes overnight stays while the Balearic Islands taxes possible environmental damage. Visitor arrivals have continued to rise despite the taxes.

In the thirteen years since the tax was introduced in Barcelona, tourist numbers have risen from 14.5 million to 18 million. Importantly, a moratorium on hotel construction has been in place in the Catalan capital since 2017, which has led to an exponential growth in tourist rental accommodation in the city.

In the case of the Balearic Islands, the annual number of tourist arrivals has increased from 13 to 14 million in the six years in which the so-called ‘ecotax’ has been in force on the islands.

Limiting cruise ships

Coastal and island resorts in Spain have also tried to combat mass tourism by limiting the number of cruise ships allowed to dock there.

In 2022, Palma de Mallorca became the first destination in Spain and the second in Europe, after Dubrovnik in Croatia, to make an agreement with major cruise ship companies to establish a limit of three cruise ships per day, and specified that only one of them could bring more than 5,000 passengers ashore.

In places like Mallorca but also in Barcelona, enormous cruise ships previously docked and released thousands of tourists into the city at once.

But once again, like with the tourist taxes introduced, a limit on cruise ship numbers, although welcome, misses the point — cruise ship customers sleep on the ship, not in the real problem underpinning Spain’s mass tourism model: accommodation.

Tourist accommodation

Varying legislation restricting Airbnb-style rentals has already been introduced in recent years in cities such as Valencia, Palma, Seville, Tarifa, Madrid, Barcelona, and San Sebastián, with varying degrees of success. 

The number of short-term rental accommodation has exploded in Spain. They are particularly popular with remote workers and among digital nomads with the foreign spending power to price out locals. Recent data shows that in the old town of Seville, over half of residential homes are used for tourism. In the area of ​​Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, 28.3 percent are tourist apartments, while the figure stands at 18.3  percent in the centre of Valencia.  

READ MORE: How Spain’s Asturias region plans to limit short-term holiday lets

Tourist taxes and limits on cruise ship numbers are welcome. But they appear to be doing little to tackle the true underlying problem with Spain’s mass tourism model.

For now, measures are being rolled out largely on a regional level, but it may require the national government to step in and legislate, as it did when it scrapped the Golden Visa earlier this year, although again the effectiveness of this measure has also been questioned. 

READ MORE: Is Spain’s decision to axe golden visa about housing or politics?

Increasing the social housing stock more generally would also go some way to alleviate the pressure on Spaniards struggling to pay rent or even find a home.

Tourism is a double edged sword in Spain. The tourism sector has long made up a significant proportion of Spanish GDP and provided employment for locals, but the model it currently has is outdated, it inflates property markets, angers Spaniards, and creates tension between tourists and locals.

In 2023, international visitors spent €108 billion in Spain, 17 percent more than in 2019. Spanish travel industry association Exceltur forecasts that in 2024 it will surpass €200 billion for the first time.

READ ALSO: ‘The island can’t take it anymore’ – Why Tenerife is rejecting mass tourism

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