How tourism saved and nearly killed Malaga

I came across an interview recently with a mayor that I found quietly remarkable. Francisco de la Torre has run the city of Málaga in southern Spain for 26 years. He is 83 years old. He had a stroke in 2020 and was back at work within a month. He has won six consecutive elections. And in the interview, he says something that most politicians in his position would never say out loud.

"The solution is not more tourists."

Málaga has been one of Europe's great urban success stories. De la Torre oversaw its transformation from a beach resort into a city with year-round cultural and economic pull, with world-class museums, research centres, international business schools, and an airport handling 25 million passengers a year. Hotel occupancy sits at 84 percent, well above the national average. By the metrics that cities usually optimise for, Málaga is winning.

And yet the mayor has looked at what winning looks like and decided it needs redesigning.

Half a million cruise passengers a year are overwhelming the historic centre. Housing prices rose 25 percent in a single year, with foreign buyers accounting for a third of purchases. Locals are being priced out of the city that their taxes and daily lives sustain. The system that generated the growth is now producing outcomes that undermine the very thing that made the city worth visiting in the first place.

De la Torre's response is not a campaign or a communications strategy. It is a set of redesigned incentives. He has frozen new licences for tourist apartments in central districts. He is introducing a tax on short-term rentals. The revenue goes directly into rent subsidies for lower-income locals. He is lobbying for planning powers to unlock land for 28,000 new homes currently stuck in bureaucracy.

This is Behavioural Design applied to an entire city. He is not asking tourists to behave differently. He is not asking landlords to be more civic-minded. He is changing the rules of the game so that the behaviour he wants becomes the natural outcome of people acting in their own interest.

In my new book ‘De Gelukscode’ (‘The Happiness Code’), I write, the unwritten and written rules that govern behaviour in any context. The most powerful insight in behavioural science about rules is this:

De la Torre understands this intuitively. He is not moralising about overtourism. He is repricing it.

What strikes me most is the framing he uses: "I always think first of the city for the citizen. If the city is good for the people of Málaga, it will also be good for those who visit." That is not just a political statement. It is a design principle. Residents are not an inconvenient side effect of a tourist economy. They are the condition that makes the tourist economy worth having.

How to use this insight:

The question De la Torre is asking about Málaga is one worth asking about any system you are responsible for: who are the rules currently optimised for, and who is paying the price?

In organisations: many workplace cultures are structured around the needs of the system rather than the people inside it. Meeting schedules optimised for visibility rather than productivity. Performance metrics that reward individual output over collective health. Promotion criteria that select for the wrong qualities. Changing these is not a culture programme. It is a rules redesign.

For anyone managing a team: before asking people to work differently, ask whether the incentive structure you have built is actually pointing in the direction you want. People are not failing to do the right thing because they lack motivation. They are usually doing exactly what the rules make rational.

For product and service designers: the users who behave in ways that surprise or frustrate you are not doing something wrong. They are responding logically to the context you built. The question is not how to change their behaviour. It is how to change the rules so that the behaviour you want becomes the easier choice.

De la Torre has governed Málaga for 26 years by understanding something that most growth-obsessed leaders miss: more is not always better. Better is better. And getting there requires redesigning the rules, not just raising the ambition.

Research on group behaviour consistently shows that shared explicit rules outperform individual willpower when it comes to sustaining behaviour change over time. A team that agrees on a specific norm, no phones in meetings, decisions made by a certain time, feedback given in a particular format, maintains that behaviour far longer than a team that simply agrees it would be good to behave that way.

The reason is that explicit rules shift the locus of enforcement from the individual to the group. When a rule exists, breaking it requires a social justification, not just a private one. The cost of non-compliance goes up, and the default shifts toward compliance without anyone having to summon willpower.

Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer's research on implementation intentions shows the same effect at an individual level. People who specify when, where, and how they will do something are significantly more likely to follow through than people who simply intend to do it. The rule creates a script. The script removes the need for a decision.

The implication for anyone trying to change behaviour in a team or organisation: stop asking people to try harder. Write the rule. Then make it the default.

Until next week,

Astrid Groenewegen

Co-Founder of SUE | Behavioural Design Academy, Author of 'The Art of Designing Behaviour' / 'De Kunst van Gedrag Ontwerpen' and ‘De Gelukscode’.