Barcelona

Barcelona City Council’s decided commitment to building a sustainable city, combined with our citizens’ whole-hearted devotion to helping to conserve the environment, have enabled our city to manage the environment more successfully than other European capitals that are both smaller in size and less complex in terms of environmental conditions. Barcelona has not only overcome the challenges, but has transformed them into opportunities to advance towards a more efficient and sustainable model.

Barcelona is now seeking to become a decarbonised economy, a city that may be dense, but which is capable of renewing itself and designing new, quality public spaces, a city able to adapt to climate change.

Ours is a city that leaves space for nature and biodiversity, that seeks to achieve greater comfort as regards noise, a city that accommodates great urban activity and is working to improve air quality, to minimise waste production and to improve management. In short, a city that is becoming more and more committed to the environment.

The city of Barcelona has managed to integrate all areas of sustainability of tourism, with the approach at sustainability from a global and integrative perspective, becoming a complex system where visitors, the resident population, land and property merge into a whole, according to an integrative approach in which environmental variable was combined with the other variables of sustainability: social, cultural and economic.

Actions and programs related to the development of tourism in the city started in 2010, conducted by Barcelona City Council, Turisme de Barcelona and others public and private institutions related to tourism in the city, highlighting the depth and excellence in managing tourism in the destination Barcelona.

The most important actions undertaken in terms of sustainable tourism resulting from the process of implementation of Responsible Tourism System are:

1. Responsible and sustainable tourism management strategy
2. Social and economic development of the destination and the local community
3. Conservation and enhancement of cultural heritage
4. Environmental Conservation

From April, 2012, a coordinating board that brings together the entire cross-sectional areas that have direct impact on local tourism policy is working with the presence of the deputy mayor to solve the complexity and mainstreaming of tourist activity in the city and to ensure the consistency of the actions of the different areas in the tourism policy of the City of Barcelona.

Highlights:

1. Barcelona, a city committed to combating climate change
2. Barcelona, a city of pedestrians that successfully resolves the mobility needs for six million journeys every day
3. Barcelona, a city growing greener
4. Barcelona, a motor for sustainable urban transformation
5. Barcelona, a city with a huge “green lung”
6. Barcelona, a city where people breathe better every day          
7. Barcelona, a city sensitive to noise
8. Barcelona, a city that accepts the waste it generates
9. Barcelona, a city committed to the new water culture
10. Barcelona, a city which closes the water cycle
11. Barcelona has a city council that is committed to the environment

Barcelona, a citizenry committed to the environment