How many tourists visit Barcelona each year?

How to get close to this number

Work from the ratio. The city has under two million residents, and the explanation elsewhere on this site gives roughly seven visitors per resident. Population times that ratio gives the answer, and the ratio is the more portable fact because it is what actually characterises the city.

Seven visitors per resident is not the highest on this site — the Venice question gives four hundred — but it applies to a real functioning city of a million and a half people rather than a small historic centre. Absolute pressure and relative pressure are different problems, and this city has an enormous amount of the first.

The policy response in the explanation is the significant part: one of the first European cities to announce a complete phase-out of short-term tourist rental licences. When tourism competes directly with residents for housing stock, the tool available to a city is licensing rather than pricing, and this is the most aggressive use of it so far.