I’m not one of those people who dislike tourists. Partly because I still enjoy the richness of different languages on the street, and partly because I know that, in other cities, I am a tourist myself — behaving just as foolishly and falling for exactly the same tricks as those gathered around Ljubljana’s Triple Bridge. And yet, for some time now, I have realised that I no longer feel at home in the city centre. I no longer have my regular places where I know all the waiters. I don’t even know the names of the cafés along the Ljubljanica anymore. Food and drink are too expensive, the offer is mostly mediocre, and the shops sell neither things I need nor anything that particularly interests me.
There is a saying about urban tourism: first there is too little of it, and then, almost immediately, too much. For a long time, we wanted our city to become interesting to others and open itself up to the world. Then, suddenly, we noticed that we could no longer make our way through the centre without constantly stepping aside for groups of tourists and wandering amateur photographers. A city that was still a hidden gem yesterday has become, beneath its polished surface, little more than a backdrop for selfies.
Tourism theory describes this as exceeding a destination’s carrying capacity. But the “right amount” is not some mathematical formula measuring how many overnight stays the city’s streets can accommodate. The key dimension highlighted by researchers is socio-psychological capacity: the point at which tourism begins to erode residents’ everyday comfort and quality of life. When local shops, bakeries and small businesses are replaced by souvenir stores and boutiques of global fashion brands, the city becomes a sterile zone of consumption in which residents are not deliberately excluded, perhaps, but are nonetheless systematically unwelcome.
The greatest trap in urban governance is an obsession with conventional economic measures of success. At the end of every season, we hear reports about growing numbers of overnight stays and rising tourism revenues. But the benefits of that income are not distributed evenly among city residents. The profits are largely privatized, flowing into the hands of property owners and multinational chains, while the costs — in the form of overstretched infrastructure, a higher cost of living and increasingly unaffordable housing — are paid by all citizens, through public spending and a declining quality of life.
If we want to save what remains of the city, we must abandon the illusion that the market will somehow find the right balance on its own. Ljubljana has already begun shifting from tourism promotion towards tourism management. But the experience of other cities suggests that even this will not prevent growing tensions between residents and visitors. There is no need to close ourselves off from the world. But we do need to make a firm commitment to shaping the city around the needs of the people who live here or use it every day as a shared common good.
When there is no longer room in the city for a resident who simply wants to have a quiet coffee served by a familiar waiter, or to cross a square without obstruction on the way to run an errand, then a tourism success story has, in reality, become a failure.
Originally published in Dnevnik, 16 July 2026.