Anti-tourist Needs to Take a Break From Anti-tourism by Going on Holiday

VALENCIA - Spain - An anti-tourist is in the midst of an existential crisis and needs to go on a holiday real bad.

After three relentless years of opposing mass tourism, harassing backpackers, and chaining himself to church fountains to protest Airbnb conversions, local anti-tourist activist Jose Marquez has announced he needs a break — specifically, a holiday.

“I just need to get away from it all,” he sighed, while leafleting a flight of Dutch cyclists with ‘GO HOME’ stickers.

Jose, 38, became a national figure in the Stop Tourists Movement after he doused a travel influencer in paella outside a Valencian cathedral, shouting, “This isn’t your story to aestheticise!” His e-book The Airbnb Apocalypse: How Tourism Ate the Soul of the City briefly topped niche Amazon charts in “Urban Despair” and “Light Cookbooks”.

Living in perpetual fear of being caught by the “anti-tourist” mafia, Jose tries to cover his tracks as best he can.

“I secretly look at holiday websites and dream of going on a long cruise maybe somewhere in the Caribbean, or booking a flight to Benidorm for a debauched cheap all-inclusive package holiday of booze, sex and drugs with all the crazy Brits. I was nearly caught browsing holidays, only yesterday, but quickly switched the page I was looking at and deleted my browser cache. I think I am in denial.”

Jose candidly admits, he’s burnt out and needs a holiday.

“The protests, the graffiti, the Marxist anti-capitalist anti-tourist manifestos typed in rage in a broken tower block — I started to feel… watched. Judged. Like a tourist in my own ideology.”

He describes an existential crisis brought on by a day trip to Marseille to film a documentary entitled Cruise Ships: Floating Cathedrals of Capitalist Decay.

“We were in cattle class for irony. But I enjoyed the croissants. I even looked up a boutique hotel — I kind of relished it.”

“If the anti-tourist people catch me looking for holidays on the net, or god forbid, actually going on holiday, I don’t think I will be able to live it down. Oh, the shame!”

As he secretly boards a carbon-neutral ferry with a small suitcase and a large hat, Jose insists he’ll return rejuvenated. “The revolution doesn’t rest,” he says. “But revolutionaries do also need a holiday sometimes.”