Panama offers free travel to tourists affected by Barcelona protests

Following the anti-tourist protests in Barcelona, ​​Panama City Mayor Mayer Mizrachi made an offer to affected travelers and those he considered “mistreated” in those protests: “Get to know Panama for a week, completely free.”

The mayor took as a reference the protests of Saturday, July 6, in which thousands of people took to the streets of Barcelona against mass tourism, denouncing the negative impact on the cost and quality of life of the local population.

At the protests, demonstrators attacked a small group of tourists with water pistols and shouted “tourists go home”, while others carried banners with slogans such as “Barcelona is not for sale”.

“When I saw the news from Spain, I said, ‘This can’t be, we have to take advantage of what they don’t want and say that we do want it,’” Mizrachi told CNN.

“It seems like some people’s trash is someone else’s treasure, right? We want to highlight Panama’s tourism and we are very pleased that they have the problems that they have in Spain. That we have an abundance and the city is overflowing with tourists. That would be positive,” he added.

In Panama, Mayer Mizrachi is a well-known “influencer”, with almost 200 thousand followers on the social network X (formerly Twitter), almost half a million on TikTok and more than 700 thousand on Instagram.

The mayor used his social media to broadcast a video offering tourists affected by the protests a fully paid trip to Panama, but he wants to locate four people in particular.

“These four people are the ones we saw in the video, the video that went viral, who were trying to protect themselves from the water, because it obviously fell on them. They were the worst treated people we could see. But any of the people who were involved in that situation, who were not in the video, were also treated badly,” Mizrachi said, inviting people to contact him through his social networks, those of the Panama City Government or those of the Panama Tourism Authority.

A CNN asked the mayor how to verify that the people who contact them are really affected tourists, to which he replied that he would leave it up to each person’s conscience if they plan to lie, but that in the end what he wants is for the tourists to go to Panama.

An indebted city hall

As part of his promotion, Mayer Mizrachi told CNN that tourists will be offered free tickets, tours and restaurants.

“As mayor, I would personally pick them up at the airport and give them a first welcome, receiving them at the Municipal House, in the Old Town, in the historic center,” he assured.

His bet is that these visitors “take an impression to the rest of the world, of a country that they might never have known otherwise”, he added.

The idea, according to the mayor, is for them to visit the Panama Canal, the Historic Center, the beaches, and the mountains, such as “Boquete”, but without resorting to public funds, taking into account that, as a new authority, at the beginning of July, he says he inherited a city hall with debts exceeding US$ 160 million.

“The best thing about all this is that not a single dollar of public money is being used, but as mayor I have been working to contact the various companies involved in tourism, from airlines to hotels to car rental companies, who want to lend us drivers with cars. Everyone wants to do their bit to give these tourists the opportunity to get to know our country,” Mizrachi explained to CNN .

Panama City Hall officially launches a campaign this week that seeks to give the city its own brand and identity, just as, according to the official, the cities of Miami and New York, in the United States, have their own logos and colors.

Figures from the Panama Tourism Authority indicate that in 2023, more than 2.5 million visitors entered the country, and almost 1.8 million did so through Tocumen International Airport.

Last year, tourists contributed $5.452 billion, with an average stay of eight days, in which they spent an average of $2.165 and around $271 per day.