Panama Mayor Offers Barcelona Tourists a Free Week in his Country

Following the anti-tourist protests that took place in Barcelona, ​​Spain, the mayor of Panama City, Mayer Mizrachi, offered travelers who were affected, and those he considered “mistreated” in these demonstrations, to get to know Panama for a week, completely free of charge. 

The mayor referred to protests on Saturday 6 July, when thousands of people took to the streets of Barcelona against mass tourism, denouncing its negative impact on the cost and quality of life of the local population.  At the protests, demonstrators sprayed a small group of visitors 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 about Spain, I said: ‘This can’t be, we have to take advantage of what Barcelona doesn’t want and to tell tourists that we do love them,'” adding: “It seems that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, right?”  We want to highlight tourism in Panama and we are delighted to have the problems that they have in Spain, that we would love to see the city overflowing with tourists.  That would be positive.” 

In Panama, Mayer Mizrachi is a well-known influencer, with almost 200,000 followers on social media, almost half a million on TikTok, and more than 700,000 on Instagram.  The mayor used his social media to spread a video offering tourists affected by the protests a fully paid trip to Panama, but he wants to locate four people in particular.  “Those four people are the ones we saw in the video, the video that went viral, who were trying to block the water, because it was clearly falling on them.  They were the most mistreated people we could see.  But any of the people who were involved in that situation, who did not appear in the video, were also mistreated,” said Mizrachi, while inviting people to contact him through his social networks, those of the Mayor’s Office of Panama or those of the Tourism Authority of Panama. 

So how will they verify that the people who contact them are really affected tourists?  To which he replied that he would leave it up to each person to decide whether they intend to abuse the authorities, but that in the end what he wants is for tourists to come to Panama.  As part of his promotion, Mayer Mizrachi says tourists will be offered tickets, tours and restaurants free of charge.  “As mayor, I would personally go to pick them up at the airport and give them a first welcome, even receiving them at the City Hall, in the Old Town, in the historic center,” he said.  His hope is that these visitors “will 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 Old Town, the beaches, and farms and mountains, like Boquete, but without using public funds, taking into account that, as the new authority, at the beginning of July, he said that he inherited a mayor’s office 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 done the work of getting in touch with the different companies that participate in tourism, from airlines to hotels to car rentals, who want to lend us drivers with cars.  They all want to do their part to give these tourists a chance to get to know our country,” Mizrachi says. 

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 US $5.452 billion, with an average stay of eight days, in which they spent US $2,165 on average and about US $271 per day.