Anti-tourism protests that have ignited across Spain could be coming for France.

Local resentment is growing in one of Britons’ favourite holiday destinations in the country’s north-west as wealthy tourists from home and abroad drive a surge in Airbnbs and snap up second homes.

The situation between tourists and locals has become particularly tense over the last month in Finistère in western Brittany, where resentment has spilled out into the open amid a housing shortage.

In Penmarc’h, a commune in the south of Finistère, two incidents occurred on 16 August. A tourist who was out jogging was brushed by a man on a bicycle who told her to “get out of here” because she wasn’t “from round here”, while “tourists go home” was found graffitied on a wall, local media reported.

Not even French visitors have escaped the backlash, with cars with Paris number plates vandalised. Ten minutes away, the town hall in Plobannalec-Lesconil said a car had been scratched with the words “No to Parisiens”, with its mayor Loïc Le Fur revealing that there had been more than four incidents of such vandalism. Meanwhile, in the small coastal town of Plogoff, the mayor discovered a sign reading “Parisiens out”.

Alongside Paris and areas including the Dordogne, Brittany and Normandy are among Britons’ top destinations thanks to easy access via ferries. Some 77 per cent of Brittany visitors are French, but nearly 20 per cent of foreign visitors are British. The region was recently dubbed the Cannes of the North by the .

Finistère has experienced a surge in tourism this year because of France’s intense heatwaves further south, which push people in hot urban areas to escape to the cooler coast, Didier Arino, of the Protourisme consultancy, told the French newspaper.

But protests against overtourism have also occurred in other regions of France, including the Basque Country, Corsica and Marseille. In June residents of Vallon des Auffes in Marseille protested against a new restaurant in their fishing port because of overcrowding and litter in their “instagrammable” port neighbourhood. In the Basque Country, protesters from the tenants group Valda occupied buildings that were rented to tourists, alleging that the landlords had not complied with regulations around tourist lets. 

Resentment towards tourists is being driven by housing shortages caused by the tourism sector, according to Mikael Bodlore-Penlaez, a geographer from Brittany and founder of the Geobreizh website.

“There are many towns in Brittany with a very high proportion of second homes, meaning houses that remain closed for a lot of the year,” he told The i Paper. “This makes it difficult for local people to find housing, thus driving up housing costs in the area.

“And there’s a second phenomenon that’s also found pretty much everywhere: seasonal rentals, especially Airbnb.”

Rémy Knafou, Professor Emeritus of Geography at the Sorbonne in Paris, and author of Hypertourism: Tourism under pressure from its own excess, said regular tourism became overtourism when a significant part of the host population began to express frustration at its more unbridled aspects of tourism, and how it was handled by politicians.

He added that the reactions against tourism in Brittany were different to protests in Barcelona in Spain or Naples in Italy, because “they are not a social movement, but the isolated reactions of individuals to the housing crisis”.

In those cities in other countries, people started getting priced out of working-class neighbourhoods in big enough numbers, and tourists’ behaviours like late-night parties were disruptive enough to generate widespread protest movements.

Second homes and short-term rentals for Airbnbs, causing housing shortages, have been at the heart of anti-tourism protests in Spain, Greece and other European countries in recent years.

In France, a 2024 law was passed giving local authorities powers to regulate Airbnbs, which was updated this year to require tourist lets to carry a registration number, allowing local authorities to impose quotas on tourist lets in their towns.

Vincent Aulnay, a member of the National Collective of Permanent Residents, which campaigns against Airbnb and tracks the number of Airbnbs in France, told The i Paper that the laws were most effective in apartment buildings where residents could vote to change the rules of their block to prevent their neighbours from using their flats for Airbnb.

Some local authorities have successfully implemented quotas against Airbnbs, which has been made easier by the 2026 update to the law. However, Aulnay said the “positive effects aren’t really being felt on the ground yet. We’re scraping the Airbnb platform for data and we are going to exceed 1 million listings in France this year”.

While discontent may simmer in certain areas, British holidaymakers need not fear a widespread anti-tourism movement emerging in France, said Knafou, because “Tourism creates wealth in areas that were once industrial”.

He added: “Tourism is a sector which is important not to mess with too much because it could have adverse effects, and a big part of the population owes their quality of life to the level of tourism.”

Bodlore-Penlaez stressed that it was unlikely for British tourists to be targeted by angry locals. He said that “an altercation can sometimes happen because of rudeness from tourists, but that can happen anywhere in the world”.

Some of the anger from Bretons was directed more towards Parisians, he said, due to Brittany’s strong regional identity, which distrusts French centralised authority, rather than a generalised hatred of all tourists.

Others in provincial France, in areas like the Basque Country and Corsica, sometimes felt looked down upon and priced out by high-earners from Paris.

The sociological phenomenon of people moving to rural areas with city salaries, or spending a lot of time there in second homes, has led to them being dubbed “neo-ruraux” or “new ruralists”, and it is a topic of political discussion. Multiple sessions at the left-wing France Unbowed party’s summer conference were dedicated to discussing the new inhabitants of rural areas.

Bodlore-Penlaez said that there was a perception of rudeness from Parisians: “They can sometimes come to the area with behaviours that are inappropriate. Particularly in terms of civic-mindedness.

“They cut queues or overtake recklessly, and all it takes is for them to have a Paris number plate for it to trigger a reaction.”