Cartagena Tourism Observatory and Data Platform
Cities Forum developed Cartagena's Tourism Observatory, a data-driven monitoring and analytics system designed to give the city continuous, evidence-based insight into the performance, seasonality and socio-economic impact of its tourism.
Year: 2024–2025 | Client: Cartagena City Council (Ayuntamiento de Cartagena) | Country: Spain
Cities Forum developed Cartagena's Tourism Observatory, a data-driven monitoring and analytics system designed to give the city continuous, evidence-based insight into the performance, seasonality and socio-economic impact of its tourism. As a companion to the city's new tourism-governance model, the Observatory supplies the objective intelligence that a modern destination needs in order to plan, coordinate and demonstrate the sustainability of its tourism activity.
Our approach
The project began by mapping the local tourism ecosystem, accommodation, cruise, cultural venues, retail and heritage operators, and defining a balanced set of key performance indicators covering demand, supply, economic impact, employment, environmental footprint and resident perception. A benchmarking exercise against comparable Spanish and Mediterranean destinations informed the calibration of Cartagena-specific metrics and targets, ensuring the Observatory measured what mattered locally rather than importing generic dashboards. On this basis the team designed and implemented a web-based platform aggregating public statistics, municipal data, mobile-phone signalling, card-transaction data and qualitative surveys, with role-based access for municipal officials, tourism operators and researchers.
What we delivered
Deliverables included the data-governance and integration plan, the Observatory methodology, the monitoring framework, seasonality and risk analyses, an economic-impact study, and a communication plan with periodic public reports. Recognising that a platform is only as useful as the people interpreting it, Cities Forum delivered capacity-building activities that trained local staff to read the data, align decisions with observed trends, and produce strategic recommendations, anchoring the Observatory in the municipality's day-to-day practice.
Impact
The platform enables Cartagena to manage its destination with genuine intelligence: anticipating pressure points such as cruise peaks or heatwaves, improving coordination among stakeholders, and supporting sustainable tourism development consistent with the Spanish Sustainable Tourism Strategy 2030 and the European Tourism Agenda. It turns dispersed, under-used data into a shared decision-making asset, allowing the city to move from reactive management to proactive, evidence-led destination stewardship. Together with the governance model, the Observatory completes a coherent toolkit, institutions plus intelligence, that positions Cartagena at the forefront of sustainable tourism management among mid-sized European cities, and consolidates Cities Forum's expertise in turning urban data into practical public-sector decision support.
