Random Tourist City

How this random tourist city generator works

Press Generate and you get a city and its country. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.

Paris, London, New York, Bangkok, Rome, Tokyo near the top, and further down Bhaktapur, Mostar, Samarkand, Fez, Cuenca, Lombok.

Somewhere in the middle sits Venice, and in Venice there is a chemist's shop with a number in the window.

The number in the pharmacy window

In Campo San Bartolomeo, a small square near the Rialto Bridge, there is a chemist called the Morelli pharmacy. Among the seasonal remedies in its window sits a red digital display.

It shows how many people live in the historic centre of Venice.

It was installed on 10 March 2008 by a local group called Venessia.com. On the day it went up it read 60,720.

In October 2021 it read 50,582, and residents were leaving at an average of 2.6 people a day. By the end of 2024 it stood at 48,489.

Nobody built the counter to make a point about tourism. They built it because they wanted to watch a number, and the number only goes one way.

A hundred and forty-five thousand, then forty-eight

Here is the whole run, from the city council's own statistics office and the group that reads them.

• 1960: 145,402
• 1970: 111,550
• 1980: 95,222
• 1990: 78,165
• 2000: 66,386
• 2008: 60,720
• 2015: around 55,000
• 2021: 50,582
• 2024: 48,489

Since the 1950s the historic centre has lost more than a hundred and twenty thousand residents. Measured from 1960, two thirds of the people who lived there are gone, inside a single lifetime.

The buildings did not fall down. They are all still there, and they have never been better maintained, because they are worth a great deal of money to somebody who does not sleep in them.

The second counter, across town

In 2023 a second display appeared, in the window of the Marco Polo Usata bookshop in Campo Santa Margherita. It counts tourist beds.

In September 2023 the two counters crossed. Tourist beds: 49,693. Residents: 49,304.

For the first time in its history, the historic city of Venice had more beds for visitors than it had residents.

The associations that keep the counters, Ocio and Venessia.com, timed the announcement for the days before a UNESCO World Heritage Committee session at which the possibility of adding Venice to the list of sites in danger was to be discussed.

Two numbers, in two shop windows, in the same small city, moving towards each other for years until they met. That is what a tourist city is, stated as arithmetic.

The argument on the other side

It would be lazy to leave it there, so here is the counter-argument, made by people who live in Venice and run it.

Laura Besio, the city councillor for citizen services, has argued that continually telling the world that Venice is dying does the city no favours. She points out that Italy's birth rate is low everywhere, and that a shrinking historic centre is not, on its own, evidence of anything unique.

Venessia.com, for their part, note that much of the loss is internal migration: people moving from the historic centre to the mainland part of the same municipality. They are not leaving Venice. They are leaving the part of it that tourists photograph.

Rents. House prices. Jobs. A shortage of the ordinary shops that a person needs on a Tuesday. None of these is caused by tourism alone, and all of them are made worse by it.

Nobody here is going to tell you what to think about that. The number is 48,489, and you can go and look at it.

The tail is the point

Most lists of tourist cities stop at about forty names, and it is the same forty every time. Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Bangkok, and around again.

Which tells you what those lists are. They are rankings by visitor number, and a ranking by visitor number is a list of the places that are already full.

The useful half of any list of tourist cities is the half you have not heard of. Bhaktapur, in the Kathmandu valley, is a medieval city that people still live in. Mostar has a bridge that was destroyed and rebuilt. Samarkand was the centre of the world for about two hundred years. Cuenca is a colonial town in the Andes with a river running through it.

Every one of them has, or will have, a version of the argument in the section above. Some of them are ten years behind Venice. Some are forty.

Generate ten and take the one you cannot place on a map.

Ways people actually use this

• Trip planning. Generate ten and take the one you have not heard of.
• Quizzes. Show the city, ask for the country. The unfamiliar ones will beat almost anybody.
• Teaching. Venice is the clearest case study in the world of what a city becomes when its economy is visitors.
• Writing. Every city here has a version of the same story at a different stage.
• Deciding where not to go in August. The famous ones are a reliable guide.

Getting more out of the filters

• Entries read "City, Country", so Contains works as a country filter. Try Italy, Japan, Spain, Morocco.
• Generate twenty and count how many are on a coast. Tourism follows water and it always has.
• Starts with and Ends with compare a single character, so pass one letter.
• Set Number high and read only the names you do not recognise. That is the useful part.

Questions people ask

Is there really a population counter in Venice?

Yes. A digital display in the window of the Morelli pharmacy in Campo San Bartolomeo, installed by the group Venessia.com on 10 March 2008. It shows the number of residents in the historic centre.

How many people live in Venice?

Around 48,489 in the historic centre at the end of 2024, down from 60,720 when the counter went up in 2008 and about 145,000 in 1960. The wider municipality, including the mainland, is much larger.

Are there more tourist beds than residents in Venice?

Since September 2023, yes. Tourist beds were counted at 49,693 against 49,304 residents. A second counter, in a bookshop window in Campo Santa Margherita, tracks the tourist figure.

Which is the most visited city in the world?

It depends who is counting and what counts as a visit. Day trippers, cruise passengers, people changing planes and cross-border commuters are all treated differently by different rankings, and the winner changes with the rule.

What is overtourism?

There is no agreed threshold. In practice it describes the point at which visitor numbers begin to displace the ordinary functioning of a place: its housing, its shops, its transport, and eventually its residents.

References

1. Venice loses another 700 residents
2. Venice now has more beds for tourists than for residents
3. As Venice's population declines, the city expands tourism management
4. Venice city centre population continues to drop