If your last city break felt like standing in a crowded elevator, you’re not alone. Following an urgent SOS from the World Travel & Tourism Council last summer, Europe’s most overwhelmed hubs are waging a war on overtourism.
RECOMMENDED: Can popular European cities ever recover from overtourism?
The hard truth is that we’re all visiting the same places, with 80 percent of global tourists currently fighting for space in the exact same 10 percent of destinations. With international trips spiking by 5 percent to cross the 1.1 billion mark, many of Europe’s cities are finally saying ‘enough’.
According to Wanderlust’s Travel Green List, these are the places that are rewriting the holiday rulebook to rescue their neighbourhoods.
The cities pushing back
After locals took to the streets in Barcelona to protest rocketing housing costs, the city’s mayor dropped a bomb on the holiday market by aiming to ban all short-term rentals by 2028. They plan to strip the licences from over 10,000 Airbnb-style apartments, trying to rescue a housing market where rents have spiked by a brutal 68 percent.
Following its 2023 campaign telling rowdy tourists to stay away, Amsterdam is now clamping down on hotels and cruise ships. The city is operating a hotel freeze, where one opens only if another closes, and has slapped a cap of 100 cruise ship calls per year and a €15 tax on day-trippers. The unapologetic end goal? Evicting cruise ships from the city centre entirely by 2035.
And if you’ve ever been to the Blue Lagoon on Comino Island, Malta, you know it used to be a nightmare of shoulder-to-shoulder selfie sticks. To fix the beach overcrowding, Malta introduced an online booking system. Visitors must now snag a morning, afternoon or evening slot, capping crowds at 4,000 at any one time. Peak crowd numbers instantly plummeted from a suffocating 12,000 down to a breezy 3,830.
Who else is clamping down?
Here are the five European hotspots that have made the green list and deployed emergency crowd-control policies to rescue their streets:
Keen to see who else is trying to save the planet from our collective holiday plans? Head over to read the full Wanderlust Travel Green List 2026.
Looking for a crowd-free getaway? Check out the underrated travel destinations to visit in 2026.
Plus: The Greek islands facing water shortages – and what it might mean for your holiday.
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