Barcelona, Málaga, Las Palmas, the busy stations, the cheap flights, and the charming Mediterranean islands are crowded with people who aren’t us. The ones who feel surplus are the others. The fatigue of neighbors in popular cities is understandable when prices push them out of their own neighborhoods, when the street becomes a continuous farewell party, and the closest shop is a franchise selling something generic.
Space has always been a battleground. The public realm isn’t something to chase only through secessionist dreams; it is mine because it sits around my home, because I was born there or because my parents did. Urbanites invading rural towns during the era of rapid growth arrived with distrust and a touch of envy. Their labor and consumption were welcomed, but the rest of the day their presence was merely tolerated. Over time, this sentiment opened into concentric circles as the world grew larger and closer at once. At the doorstep of the promised land stands a crowd of younger outsiders, nearly crowded into the peninsula. Not everyone is a prodigy like Lamine Yamal, nor does everyone possess Jeff Bezos’s fortune to vanish from view during holidays. The democratization of mobility — when it’s driven by leisure rather than desperation — has turned European capitals into crowded hubs during long weekends, just as past generations crowded into regional malls. Package tourism to the Caribbean becomes a practical, air-conditioned trip of a kind from childhood. People resist the idea of tourist outfits and cruise ships or the mountain version with campers and boots, but that stance is classist. If everyone moves, it’s fair. If only a select few, wrapped in a so-called premium label, move, then an elite remains in motion while others are left behind. The images of crowded Everest ropes or elephants bored by jeep lines in Kenya are jarring, yet the question remains: where should the boundary be, and who pays the price? The idea of widening the state’s welfare once seemed to set limits; now the real question is who gets to travel and at what cost.
Democracy has always been hard to swallow for some. Formal rights and freedoms for all may feel uneven, a subtle elitism that suggests one is fit to vote and a neighbor is not. It is a sunset that hides many others’ screens, or the all-inclusive dining room that becomes intolerable because of the children of others. In this struggle, unity matters as much as individual rights, and the spirit is one for all.