Porto and Lisbon are back in the global spotlight, this time for the sheer scale of tourism compared with their resident populations. A worldwide study by car hire comparison platform DiscoverCars ranks the two Portuguese cities among the top 10 cities with the highest ratio of tourists to residents.
The findings underline just how central tourism is to their economies, while also prompting renewed debate about overcrowding and the strain on everyday life.
According to the Jornal de Negócios, citing a report based on data from Euromonitor and official government sources, Porto ranks fifth in the table, with seven million international visitors compared with a resident population of around 250,000. That works out at roughly 2,800 tourists for every 100 residents.
Lisbon comes in eighth, with 1,793 tourists per 100 inhabitants after welcoming 10.4 million international visitors last year, against a population of about 580,000. The study aims to pinpoint the most and least saturated destinations by directly comparing visitor numbers with local population size.
The same source notes, however, that the figures for Porto and Lisbon — as with the other cities analysed — are considered “quite inflated”. It highlights the cases of Dubrovnik in Croatia and Reykjavik in Iceland, which top the ranking, followed by Venice and Geneva.
At the other end of the scale, the platform also identified cities with the lowest tourist density. Cairo leads this list, recording 2.5 million visitors for a population of 23.7 million, or just 11 tourists per 100 residents. It is followed by Jakarta, São Paulo, Mexico City and Tokyo.
