Outside peak tourist season, Ivana Misic needs a matter of minutes to drive the five kilometres from her home in Zupa Dubrovacka to the medieval walls of Dubrovnik’s Old Town, where until recently she worked in a boutique selling ties.
Come spring and summer, however, it’s a completely different story.
“During the season, it takes me an hour to get to the city, but if there’s a problem somewhere, a traffic accident, a landslide on the road - and there’s only one road to get to the city - sometimes it takes me two hours,” said the 47-year-old mother of three.
“The season here starts in April and I can’t find a parking space already,” Music told BIRN last month. “It’s normal for us to spend two hours in the car a day, although we mostly spend those two hours in a queue or standing still,” she said, referring to commuters to the Old Town.
At the southern tip of Croatia, Dubrovnik is the most visited city in Croatia and among the most visited in the world when measured in terms of tourists per capita.
Last year, the city registered more than 1.3 million arrivals. In terms of overnight stays, it clocked up a little more than 4.2 million, a figure ‘beaten’ only by Rovinj, in the north.
According to the European Union’s statistics office, Eurostat, in 2024, Croatia ranked 14th in terms of tourist arrivals out of the EU’s 27 member states plus seven other countries where Eurostat operates. That year, the country of 3.8 million people registered roughly 20.2 million tourist arrivals, or 5.3 tourists per capita.
Tourism is a mainstay of the Croatian economy, but its growth has not come without a cost for the most popular destinations – from high prices to crowds, noise pollution, over-burdened infrastructure and the demise of a way of life for generations in the charming alleyways of old Adriatic towns and once-sleepy islands.
This story is based on the accounts of more than 180 people in eight countries – Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, France, Spain and Poland – who responded to a BIRN questionnaire about life in towns and cities popular with tourists.
The challenges are largely the same wherever you look. Some places have tried to curb the impact with measures such as visitor fees, cruise ship quotas and restrictions on short-term rentals.
But tourism marketing expert Edvin Jurin said what needs to change is the “mindset” of people.
“We don’t have that culture of sustainability of space,” he told BIRN. “We have become exclusively real estate-oriented: sell your grandfather’s estate to an investor who earns per square metre.”
“The harder the times, the higher the level of greed,” said Jurin. “And it’s greed that eats up space the most.”
A cruising ship carrying 2,200 guests docks in the port of Gruz in Dubrovnik, April 2026. Photo: V. Tesija/BIRN
Manos Venieris lives in the central Koukaki neighbourhood of Athens, on Acropolis hill.
The 37-year-old said mass tourism was “seriously disrupting our daily routines” in the neighbourhood.
“The constant noise from rolling suitcases and luggage trolleys, day and night, has become unbearable. Our building has effectively turned into a hotel, with 60 to 70 per cent of the apartments now operating as Airbnbs,” he asserted.
“As a result, there is constant noise from tourists enjoying their holidays late into the night, while real residents are trying to live normal lives just on the other side of the wall.”
Zozefina Valopetropoulou, a 45-year-old waitress who works in the centre of Athens, said the combination of tourism and technology is compromising her privacy, particularly when tourists take photos of her without her consent.
“It’s an uncomfortable situation that is becoming more and more frequent,” Valopetropoulou told BIRN.
