Overtourism is ruining Cornwall, too – but we feel powerless against the ‘emmets’ who ruin our summers

As visitors in Barcelona are soaked by demonstrators with water pistols, protests against tourism have reached new heights. But Fiona McGowan, who lives near St Ives, insists her fellow countrymen would never resort to guerilla tactics – would they?

Wish you weren’t here: Newquay at the height of summer (Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

When I heard about locals in Barcelona resorting to water pistols to deter foreign visitors, I rolled my eyes – “As though that will address the problem of overtourism,” I thought. It just gives the tourists a fun story to go home with.

Where I live in west Cornwall, the anti-tourist sentiment runs just as deep. But residents here have come to terms with being overrun for parts of the year when we’d really like to enjoy the place to ourselves – because the pros and cons of tourism cut both ways.

Like so many beautiful, rural places with pretty towns and interesting heritage, Cornwall makes its living out of visitors. The population swells like the incoming tide, and every year it seems to have a greater impact on those of us who live here. Businesses – from bucket-and-spade shops (yes, they still exist) to fish and chippies, from Airbnbs to supermarkets – depend on that influx. Staff are pulled in for the summer season, providing jobs for locals who spend the rest of the year lurching from universal credit to minimum-wage jobs and zero-hours contracts.

My 16-year-old daughter has a summer job waitressing in a fish and chip shop in St Ives. Half of the staff are her age, and they are paid £8 an hour. All of them are locals born and bred. From the first day at work, she slipped into the “God, tourists are so annoying, but we have to smile nicely because they’re paying our wages” mindset. I have friends who get seasonal cleaning jobs: it’s gruelling, poorly paid and thankless work, and there are never enough cleaners for the thousands of rooms rented out each summer. And it generates resentment.

“Our” beaches are rammed with people, and littered with discarded barbecues and beer bottles; twee tourist destinations like Mousehole, St Ives and Port Isaac are rendered no-go for us locals. In the summer months, my kids and I spend our days in the garden, walking on the coast paths or in the parks. I will never take my children to the beach until after 4pm, when the emmets are packing up to leave and we have half a chance of parking in the (ludicrously expensive) beach car parks.

“Emmets” is Cornish for ants – and local slang for holidaymakers, the swarms of tourists we love to hate. We just can’t hate them too much. We would be penniless without them.

But there is no way to control the numbers that pour into the county at this time of year. The seasonal horror of driving anywhere is something we locals just have to endure. So you can see why there is such a strong “national” identity here in Cornwall: the black and white St Piran’s flag stickers on cars, the sea shanties, and the Cornish language translations on street signs, buses and in supermarkets.

I can’t even call myself a local – my kids have been through primary and secondary school here, true, but I am also an emmet, a Londoner who moved here a mere 13 years ago. If push ever came to shove, I would be lumped in with those out-of-towners in a heartbeat.

Even our maligned water company loves to hate tourists. With population figures tripling in the summer, South West Water benefits financially from a huge increase in water use... but, without fail, there will also be massive overflows of raw sewage that cause the lifeguards to leap into action and call everyone out of the sea as great brown streaks leak out across the turquoise bays. “It’s the fault of the tourists,” they will say. “Too many wet wipes blocking the sewage works.”

The artery that leads from Exeter to the very tip of Cornwall is another bugbear – the A bloody 30. A chunk of it has been under construction for two years, which has doubled or tripled journey times from west Cornwall to pretty much anywhere else. Now that it’s finished, the Facebook comments tell a story: “It’s just going to get the tourists down here faster.” And, sure enough, it now takes me four times as long to drive to my local railway station, because of bottlenecks at my nearby roundabout – and the summer holidays haven’t even started.

Whenever I hear Cornish people moaning, or have a good rant myself, I always ask: “But what can be done?” My dear Barcelonan compadres, I have come to realise that the answer is nothing. When a region or city builds its entire economy around tourists, we have to accept the damage to our environment; our resentment; and our livelihoods being dependent on the gig economy. Would we have it any other way?