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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

Could Spain lock down its unvaccinated or make Covid vaccines compulsory?

More than 60 percent of Covid hospitalisations in Spain are people who haven’t been vaccinated, but can Spanish authorities follow the example of Austria and lockdown only the unvaccinated or roll out stricter restrictions just for them?

Published: 19 November 2021 14:48 CET

A woman holds a sign reading "No vaccine, no 5G, no face mask" during a demonstration in Madrid against Covid-19 vaccines and the mandatory use of face masks. (Photo by JAVIER SORIANO / AFP)

Around 4 million people over the age of 12 who could have been vaccinated against Covid-19 already haven’t done so thus far.

A study by Spain’s Sociological Studies Centre (CIS) published on Wednesday found that almost half of Spaniards – 46.2 percent – think the Covid-19 vaccine should be compulsory for everyone.

Asked if they believed health staff, care home workers and employees who deal directly with the public should be obliged by law to be vaccinated, 67.3 percent responded yes.

These high figures are perhaps unsurprising given the degree of Covid vaccine acceptance in Spain.

Almost 90 percent of all eligible people have now been fully vaccinated and Spanish regional health departments are not facing any hesitance as their Covid booster shot campaigns gather pace.

Even though Spain’s epidemiological situation is so far considerably better than in other parts of Europe, Covid infections are growing at a faster rate every day, and many autonomous governments are now calling on stricter measures for unvaccinated people in particular a month away from Christmas.

So will the Spanish government ever consider placing unvaccinated people under lockdown or making vaccines mandatory as has happened in Austria?

“No, it cannot be done here,” former Supreme Court magistrate Jorge Rodríguez-Zapata told Spanish daily El Periódico de España.

“It would breach fundamental human rights.”

Spain does not have the legal umbrella to place people who have not been vaccinated under lockdown or make Covid-19 vaccination compulsory.

In fact, the country’s two states of emergencies – during which the initial full lockdown and other restrictive measures could be imposed by the regions without the courts’ consent – have both been declared unconstitutional.

The Covid health pass, widely used across Europe to control access to bars, restaurants and other establishments, never took off in Spain because local judges kept overruling their implementation, for the most part labelling the health passport requirement as ‘not ideal’ or ‘disproportionate’.

Regional leaders such as Andalusia’s health head Jesús Aguirre or Cantabrian president Miguel Angel Revilla have admitted in the past days that they’re watching the tough action being taken in Austria and now also Germany with a degree of envy.

“I’m all in favour of individual freedoms as long as they don’t negatively affect others, there’s no right for these people to risk others’ lives just because they don’t want to get vaccinated,” the outspoken Revilla said.

“More than restrictions, I ask that everyone be vaccinated, by hook or by crook.”

No vaccine is compulsory by Spanish law, and since the pandemic began the Spanish government has made it clear that the Covid-19 vaccination would be voluntary, at no time using a forceful rhetoric.

This has clearly contributed to the success of the campaign overall, but with most of the hard work completed, many feel it wouldn’t be justified for unvaccinated people to spoil the progress made, especially if they form part of certain groups.

For example, the Catalan Federation of Intellectual Disability (Dincat) has repeatedly appealed to the regional government to carry out a legal reform that establishes mandatory vaccination among health professionals who work with risk groups.

Unvaccinated health workers in Spain represented 7 percent of the total in September, according to official stats.

Spain's anti-vax movement is considerably smaller than that of other European countries. Photo: GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT / AFP — Spain’s anti-vax movement is considerably smaller than that of other European countries. Photo: GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT / AFP

The head of Spain’s Businesses Association CEOE has also called for vaccines to be compulsory, arguing that for “the economy and tourism to flow and society to function… those who do not want to be vaccinated will have to stay at home.”

But the fact remains that regional governments – especially now that they don’t enjoy the freedoms granted to them under the states of alarm – cannot pass any emergency law which will force health workers or other unvaccinated groups to get the jab, and most officials are well aware of that.

At best, they want the government to pass a ‘pandemic law’ which will give them some extra powers to legislate, and their primary focus is having the Covid health pass accepted by Spanish courts or for their ruling not to count.

According to Spanish health law expert José Bestard, even if Spain did want to replicate the Austrian example of locking down its unvaccinated or consider making vaccines mandatory, “it certainly could not do so through the state of alarm decrees”.

There is no legal framework to force either scenario. Decrees could be introduced but they would have to be regulated by law because current legislation protects the patient’s right to decide. And just like what happened with the states of alarm, such laws could end up being considered unconstitutional.

It would in effect result in a collision between the fundamental rights of each individual and collective health.

There is one example in which judges in Spain favoured public health over individual freedoms: an outbreak of measles in Granada in 2010 which arose when a group of parents did not want their children vaccinated against the disease.

In this case, public authorities took the matter to court and judges ruled the families to be vaccinated in the interest of public health.

The Austrian government on Friday announced that the country will go into its fourth nationwide lockdown and will make Covid-19 vaccines compulsory, as leaders again pleaded with the public to get their vaccines.

The German government and states have also agreed on nationwide rules that would see unvaccinated people excluded from many public places, and vaccinated people will have to take Covid tests if the situation worsens.

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Good tourist, bad tourist: How to travel responsibly in Spain

Barcelona resident David Mar doesn’t travel, but he thinks about tourism every day.

Tourists crowd the buses — essential for movement in a hilly neighbourhood like his. They leave trash for residents to discover in the morning. They shout and sing at night and wander drunkenly through the residential streets, ambling into backyards and pulling down laundry on clotheslines.

“It’s a disturbance that goes from when you wake up in the morning until you go to bed at night,” he told The Local Spain. “You don’t feel welcome in your own neighbourhood.”

Mar lives in Turó de la Rovira, on a 262-metre hill that towers over the city.

A viewpoint atop the hill called Los Bunkers de Carmel has gone viral on TikTok for its sweeping city views, bringing hordes of tourists to come drink wine, watch the sunset, and sometimes party into the early morning.

But for the residents of the surrounding Carmel neighbourhood — among Barcelona’s poorest — the consequences of this tourist explosion have been severe.

Mar was involved in a physical altercation with a group of four Australians, after he confronted them for tipping over parked motorcycles.

And last June a 76 year-old man was assaulted by a group of seven English-speaking youths after he tried to stop them from jumping a fence that had been put up around the Bunkers.

Such events are commonplace in Carmel, Mar says, with the post-pandemic massification of tourism provoking an unstoppable flow of Instagram-like-hungry travellers, fuelled by an increasingly lucrative industry whose interests often conflict with those of local residents.

“It collides directly with the most basic rights of those who live here,” Mar says. “Our right to housing, our right to transportation, our right to rest peacefully.”

With some 1.3 billion international arrivals globally in 2023, more people are travelling for pleasure than ever before in human history.

But as excessive crowds stress infrastructure and locals find themselves pushed out of their own communities, prevailing attitudes towards travel must be reconsidered if global tourism is to continue growing sustainably.

“Tourism isn’t a right, it’s a decision that you make,” Mar says. “And if you do it, you must be aware of the consequences it can generate.”

A couple uses a selfie stick to take a picture next to a banner warning tourists on drought alert in Catalonia, near Sagrada Familia basilica in Barcelona. (Photo by PAU BARRENA / AFP)

Empathy abroad

Bartolomé Deyá Tortella, a researcher and the Dean of Tourism Faculty at the University of the Balearic Islands, says few tourists consider such consequences.

Instead, they embrace their inner hedonist and focus their vacation time on maximum pleasure for minimum price. This mindset might cause a tourist to forget their values and do things they’d never do at home.

“We all become capitalists when we practice tourism,” Deyá told The Local. “You think, ‘I paid for this, I’m on vacation, I’m having my moment of pleasure, I worked the whole year for it.”

Such thinking could explain why someone might respect quiet hours in their own neighbourhoods, but shout drunkenly in the streets late at night while on vacation.

Or why on a trip to Mallorca, where Deyá lives and works, a tourist might feel compelled to take a 10-minute shower — despite the water-stressed Mediterranean island’s near-drought conditions — while residents routinely shower in a minute or less.

Failure to consider saving water or respecting quiet hours comes down to lack of empathy, Deyá says, and our tendency to other the people whose communities we enter while traveling.

“Act as if you were in your own home,” he says. “If when you’re in your own city you don’t shout in the street because you know your neighbours are sleeping, why do it when you’re traveling?”

Social sustainability

Much has been said about environmental sustainability, but it’s easy to forget the social impacts of travel; how our interactions with local people and economies can change that society.

“When every one of us travels, it implies that the places where we came from are transformed, the places we pass through are transformed, and obviously, so are the places we arrive to,” Manuel de la Calle Vaquero, Vicedean of the Faculty of Commerce and Tourism at Complutense University of Madrid, told The Local Spain.

With this in mind, the most sustainable way to travel is by using one’s presence to positively impact the local community.

Or in other words, to leave a place better than you found it.

“When you jump on a plane, it’s important to make sure that trip counts for something positive,” says Justin Francis, founder of Responsible Travel, a holiday company that collaborates with local partners to plan socially and environmentally sustainable vacations.

“I advise people to fly less, keep short trips flight-free – and, when you do fly, stay in a place longer and travel in a way that does as much good as possible,” Francis says.

Anti-gentrification banners addressing were already hanging from balconies in Barcelona back in 2017. (Photo by Josep LAGO / AFP)

Neighbourhood colonisers

One of the most significant ways in which tourism can alter the social landscape is through accommodation.

Not long ago, tourists and residents in Spain did not typically mix, with tourists sticking near their hotels, rarely straying into residential zones, Deyá says.

But today’s tourist has matured, and now expects novelty; an “authentic” experience that they can convince themselves distinguishes them from the thousands of other tourists expecting the same.

Nowadays they live among residents, in apartments instead of hotels, utilizing short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, which has led to the dissolution of boundaries between a city’s tourist and local zones.

Vaquero describes this new kind of tourist as the “anti-tourism” tourist, in the sense that they’re not interested in the sort of tourism promoted by governments and travel agencies, but instead consider themselves the explorers of new “authentic” destinations outside the typical tourist sphere.

“The one who wants to leave the traditional tourist circuit and supposedly goes looking for ‘authentic’ neighbourhoods — that tourist is obviously the coloniser,” Vaquero says.

The boom in short-term vacation rentals has led to what’s been dubbed the “Airbnb effect” in neighbourhoods worldwide, in which residents are slowly replaced by a constant flux of tourists. For landlords, vacation rentals can be far more lucrative than renting to residents, thus incentivizing them to evict long-term tenants in order to list their properties on Airbnb.

This is exactly what happened to Emanuele Dal Carlo. His landlord didn’t want to renew the lease on his small Venice apartment because they could make more renting it out on Airbnb. Like so many other Venetians, Dal Carlo had to move to the mainland.

To better understand the cultural erosion he saw happening to his city as a result of Airbnb, Dal Carlo enlisted the help of researchers to conduct a study, through which he discovered only 2,000 of the 3,300 Airbnbs in the city were registered with the government, and many were rented by foreign hosts with zero connection to Venice.

This means that much of the money tourists spend on accommodation never lands on the ground, thus eliminating any potential benefit to the local economy.

“What’s wrong is that the money available from tourism is not fairly distributed between workers and residents,” Dal Carlo says.

Dal Carlo now runs Fairbnb, an ethical Airbnb alternative which promotes “community-powered tourism.” Hosts are certified local, and the platform fees are put directly towards a social project in the local community, like food redistribution or sustainable energy initiatives.

As a tourist, the best way to avoid feeding the problem is by avoiding short term rentals when possible, Dal Carlo says, and instead booking accommodations with local businesses, like small independent hotels or traditional bed and breakfasts.

And if you absolutely must use Airbnb, Dal Carlo suggests booking with local hosts.

“If you’re traveling to Venice and your host is from Finland, ask yourself some questions,” he says.

An elderly local man on crutches waits to cross as a group of tourists using Segways squeeze by and into the narrow streets of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. (Photo by PAU BARRENA / AFP)

Whose fault?

In Spain, anti-tourism protests have crescendoed in recent weeks. The travel industry, it seems, has grown beyond its means, and locals are taking note.

To some degree, the problem can be traced to poor planning on the part of local governments and the unchecked expansion of algorithmic platforms like Airbnb.

Deyá points out that many government entities in Spain have welcomed tourist money, pursuing marketing campaigns without investing in adequate preparation.

“Tourism is the typical sector where many governments say, ‘ok, let’s leave it, because this works. Don’t touch it,’” Deyá says. “But there’s been no planning, there’s been no strategy.”

Back in Barcelona, the city’s public transport authority was involved in the promotion of the Carmel bunkers through its Bus Turistic webpage, encouraging tourists to come see the “spectacular views over Barcelona.”

The promotion was taken down on April 16th after continued anti-tourism protests from the Turó de la Rovira neighbourhood council, of which Mar is a member.

But as is the case with so many industries in a crowded world full of contradictions, the individual cannot be absolved of all responsibility, as one’s choice to participate in harmful systems enables their continuation.

No law or tourist tax will compel tourists to act with empathy, and the absence of such regulations should not be used to justify one’s bad behaviour abroad.

“The problem is that we’re hypocrites, and we think that it’s someone else who has to solve the problem,” Deyá says.

Mar, who’s never been much of a traveller himself, is no longer interested in traveling internationally after seeing what tourism has done to his city.

“So much of my city has become inhospitable for residents,” he says. “Because we’re truly suffering from it here in Barcelona, the concept of tourism disgusts me more and more.”

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