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By the Numbers

Dubrovnik: ~27 tourists per resident/yr — Europe's highest ratio

This scan quantifies the visitor-to-resident load in the handful of cities that dominate 'overtourism' headlines — Venice, Barcelona, Dubrovnik, Amsterdam — against the 2026 Yanolja Global Tourism City Attractiveness Index, which shows several much lower-volume, high-reputation cities ranking above some of the highest-ratio destinations. The picture matters because headline volume and visitor sentiment are measuring two different things: raw crowding pressure on residents versus how tourists emotionally rate the experience once they arrive.

The overtourism narrative concentrates on a small set of cities where the sheer ratio of visitors to residents has become structurally extreme. Dubrovnik's Old Town, per multiple 2025-2026 sourcing, hosts roughly 27 tourists for every resident annually, the highest such ratio identified in Europe, driven by cruise concentration: the Dubrovnik Port Authority projects more than 661,000 cruise passengers across 461 ship calls by the end of 2026. The Old Town's permanent population has fallen to roughly 1,157-1,500 residents, down from 5,000 in 1991, meaning the ratio is calculated against a shrinking denominator, not just a growing numerator.

Venice presents the starkest resident-collapse case. The historic center's official population has dropped to 48,000-50,000 residents (Associated Press, cited via 2024-2025 reporting), against a range city officials and media put at 25-30 million annual arrivals once day-trippers are folded in with overnight stays. Official accommodation-based arrivals were 5,876,797 in 2024 (Venice's official Yearbook of Tourism), but that figure captures only registered overnight arrivals — the much larger 20-30 million figure includes cruise and day-trip traffic that never registers in a hotel. On peak season days, one 2026 source estimates the ratio can spike to as high as 38 tourists per resident, though this is a seasonal peak figure, not an annual average, and should not be conflated with the yearly ratio.

Barcelona's numbers are more contested across sources, illustrating a live definitional problem in this space: Barcelona city recorded 26.1 million visitors to the wider 'Destination Barcelona' region in 2025 (Barcelona Tourism Observatory, cited March 2026), while a July 2026 Forbes analysis calculates a 16-to-1 tourist-to-resident ratio using the city's 1.6 million population against that 26.1 million figure. Other sources cite different ratios (roughly 10:1 or 9:1) depending on whether they use city-only visitor counts (16 million in 2025) versus the larger regional 26.1 million figure — a reminder that 'the ratio' is not one number but a function of which boundary and which visitor definition is used. Barcelona's tourism sector generated approximately €14.04 billion in 2025 (Barcelona Tourism Observatory), representing roughly 14% of city GDP and supporting an estimated 150,000 jobs, which is the counterweight cited by the city's own economic-promotion office against the crowding cost.

Amsterdam is a case of policy failing to constrain a self-imposed cap: the city's 20-million overnight-stay limit has been breached repeatedly, with 2025 overnight stays reaching 23.7 million against roughly 921,000-942,000 residents, prompting a resident lawsuit against the municipality for non-enforcement of its own cap, as reported by NL Times in May 2026.

Against this backdrop, the 2026 Yanolja Global Tourism City Attractiveness Index — built jointly by Yanolja Research, Purdue University's CHRIBA Institute, and Kyung Hee University's H&T Analytics Center, scoring 261 cities on scenery, culture, experiences and hospitality via 14-language social-media sentiment analysis — produces a striking divergence. New York topped the overall ranking, with Paris second, Osaka third, Kyoto fourth and Seoul fifth. Venice, despite its overtourism notoriety, ranked only 49th on the same index, while Barcelona ranked 35th. Meanwhile Vancouver, a city that draws a comparatively modest 11 million visitors a year, ranked 70th overall in the earlier iteration of this same index cited by a Vancouver Sun columnist — landing in the index's 'second tier' behind nearby Seattle (32nd, ~39 million visitors/year). The index's own framework explicitly separates 'awareness' (global recognition) from 'attractiveness' (experiential sentiment once visited) — New York led both categories, but many high-volume European cities scored well on awareness while lagging on the sentiment-driven attractiveness axis, and Vancouver's low placement was attributed by researchers cited in that reporting to a comparative shortfall in 'culture and history' relative to top-tier peers like New York, Paris, Kyoto, Rome and Seoul.

The two datasets are not measuring the same phenomenon and should not be merged into a single 'best/worst' narrative. Visitor-to-resident ratios measure infrastructural and demographic strain — a math problem of numerator (arrivals) over a shrinking or fixed denominator (residents). The Yanolja index measures social-media-derived sentiment and awareness, which correlates more with cultural depth, historic density and brand recognition than with crowding. A city can carry an extreme visitor-to-resident ratio (Dubrovnik, Venice) and still register only mid-table on sentiment, while a city with far lower absolute visitor volume (Vancouver) can rank even lower — for reasons unrelated to overtourism pressure at all.

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August 20, 2026

August 20, 2026

August 20, 2026