What makes the ideal grand départ? Barcelona certainly adds grandeur to the Tour, and the Tour is of sufficient scale to bring something to the city as well.
A grand départ is an expensive ticket. Barcelona is said to have fronted up €8 million; Bulgaria paid a similar sum for the Giro d’Italia in May. It’s a premium on the going rate for hosting fees: €100k for a stage start and €140k for a stage finish of the Tour de France.
Based on this, the gran partida is three starts (3 x €100k) and two finishes (2 x €140k) so the bill ought to be €580k and you’d think that could be rounded down €500k as a package.
Exclusivity and duration comes at a premium. The Tour de France can pass like a shooting star. A grand départ is more notable, a more durable fixture than a morning or afternoon. This year’s Tour will visit places like Hagetmau, Ussel and Champagnole, on the map for a moment but can’t hope to generate the barrage of “content” that a long weekend in Barcelona offers.
The start is more than three days of sport. The Tour opened on Wednesday, lodging riders, organisers and more from then until Monday morning. This travelling circus amounts to roughly 1,800 occupants a night alone on the Tour’s ticket. Add to that attendant media, teams booking for extra staff beyond their 28 bed allocation, plenty of fans and more and it starts to put something back into the local coffers.
What other event of this scale can come to town and beam images around the world? It’s hardly an unknown quantity. According to the city hall it got 26 million visitors last year, of which 18 million were foreigners; it can be hard to compare measurement methodologies and local boasts but this a lot; not Paris but maybe more than London or Tokyo.
Some barceloní complain about overtourism. Social media increasingly herds tourists to visit the same places. Can the Tour redirect people to Montjuic instead? Unlikely. If millions came last year to take selfies at the Sagrada Familia, Nou Camp and La Rambla, who will come next year? Locals may be crowded out of their local bar, bus… or even housing but the tourism industry needs flow: airlines, hoteliers, retailers and restaurants count on sustained high tourist visits.
One thing specific to this start is the promotion of sport as much as tourism. The lead figure behind the bid has been David Escudé, a Catalan politician who held the sports brief and himself a keen athlete. Yes the city wants to show the landmarks but it wants to promote sport. Escudé is now leading the bid to bring the Olympic Games back to Barcelona after 1992 and the Tour this weekend is a stage along that route. Similarly the city hall is trying to build more of a cycling culture and the Tour is being used as part of this.
Tour organisers ASO are notable for their ability to cross-sell something thanks to a large portfolio of races. ASO help run the Volta a Catalunya every March which finishes with laps around Montjuic. The Vuelta a España, now 100% owned by ASO, had its start in 2023 in Barcelona, opening with an evening time trial and the next day used a hillier version of the Montjuic circuit than the Volta which mirrors tomorrow’s stage. With hindsight it was a dress rehearsal for 2026.
It’s not an incongruous start. Catalunya is an autonomous community in Spain but also a a wider identity, parts of France share a link. The eastern Pyrenees see the yellow and red Senyera flag fluttering in the tramontane wind on both sides of the border. The map is from 1608 and the top left of “Cataloniae” gets close to the foot of the Tourmalet and includes Monday’s stage finish in Les Angles… or Els Angles as it was once known.
Nobody has turned a pedal yet but Barcelona ought to work. It gives glamour to the Tour and works on a practical level as it’s within reach of France, a foreign start but only just. Internally Tour staff have a house phrase that “a good Tour is one that starts well”. Let’s hope so because as onlookers that’s worth the fee and then some.
Tourism is actually become a problem of sort for Catalunya in the last couple of decades, essentially since the 2008 crisis. An important part of the regional economy? Of course (~12% of GDP), although less than, say, manufacturing industry (~16%).
But all in all, unlike other productive sectors (pharma, or part of the primary sector), it currently generates a big deficit through its negative impacts (which the government takes care of), on top of the constant need of public subventions of every kind, for example because most workers of the sector can’t live anymore on their wages due to high cost of the life in the whole region, so lots of them actually survive on… public aid in different forms (legions of “working poors”).
Tourism is big, so you can’t just switch it off, and the private owners who (or “which”, as in funds, not persons) are extracting profit from the model also have strong political influence through association, lobbying or lawfare. And at the end of the day, besides getting direct and indrect subventions, they’re taking advantage of the ahem “soft spot” of European governments towards, well, protecting the well-being of their citizens, hence paying the difference between wage and survival income.
It’s a classic economy case-study for dependency models, in Italian or Spanish it sounds even better because it’s the same word for “addiction”: the sort of condition when something doesn’t make you feel well anymore, it even makes you feel bad, but you aren’t just able to stop.
Interestingly enough, Catalunya’s got a similar issue with the meat industry!
Logistics or construction also have their little virtues (cit. N. Ginzburg) and many flaws, but they’re currently just a little smaller than tourism (around 10% of regional PIB each) while not having the same negative impact on the whole of local economy. At least they aren’t disappearing money. Instead, tourism or the meat industry as a whole are nowadays destroying wealth, but private subjects gets the profit while public money covers the deficit.
A divulgative source accesible to not-experts:
https://www.eleconomista.es/economia/noticias/13922514/05/26/la-dependencia-del-turismo-y-las-carnicas-tira-a-la-baja-el-pib-per-capita-de-cataluna.html