Tourist cities in the pre-pandemic period under media scrutiny: The cases of Lisbon and Oporto

Abstract

The transformations that took place in the historic centres of Lisbon and Porto due to the tourist boom could not have failed to fascinate the Portuguese media, becoming a fertile ground for the debate of ideas that, between 2014 and the end of 2019, followed all the incidents of two cities that, from peaceful urban centres, became cities heading towards tourist overcrowding. In order to approach the documentary corpus consisting of 120 texts published in the Portuguese media in the period above, our study took content analysis as theoretical-methodological support. Seeking to frame some theories that intend to explain the intolerance towards the predominant tourist model in many urban destinations and taking into account the opinions expressed in the texts under analysis regarding the perceptions of the residents of these cities in a context of overtourism, this paper demonstrates the existence of antagonistic positions between a certain intelligentsia linked to urbanism, ecology and sustainable tourism that actively opine in the media discourse and a set of institutional actors with high responsibilities in the areas of tourism and municipal management.

Keywords

• tourism boom
• media discourse
• tourismphobia
• tourist-resident relationship
• lisbon
• porto