In Spain, domestic travel restrictions do not apply to visitors from abroad. The dichotomy underlines the trouble European nations face balancing public health and economic recovery.

By Raphael Minder

MADRID — Óscar Robles Álvarez yearned to celebrate Easter this year with his family in his hometown in northeastern Spain, which he has not visited since Christmas 2019.

Instead, he will spend the holiday on Sunday in Madrid, where he now lives, because of domestic travel restrictions imposed to stem another wave of Covid-19. He says he understands why the government recently extended those rules, but cannot fathom why no such travel ban applies to foreign tourists visiting his hometown, Getxo, a beach resort popular with surfers 80 miles from the border with France.

“This situation is completely unfair,” said Mr. Robles Álvarez, 50, who worked in finance but is currently jobless. “Citizens are being asked to behave responsibly by politicians who themselves decide completely incoherent Covid rules.”

In the prelude to Easter, a debate in Spain about whether double standards are being applied to contain Covid-19 has been intensifying. The polemic is echoed in other European countries, where the authorities have also restricted internal travel while allowing their citizens to go abroad and permitting foreign tourists to enter and move about more freely.

The back-and-forth over the rules reflects the difficult balancing acts for European governments trying to blunt the pandemic while keeping their economies afloat, particularly when it comes to the tourism revenues that are so critical to countries like Italy and Spain. After seven years of consecutive growth in tourism arrivals, Spain welcomed 19 million people last year, down from almost 84 million in 2019.

The Spanish government has defended its approach, stressing that visitors from most other countries do not present the same health risks as residents on the move because they must test negative for Covid-19 before traveling. But local residents do not have the option to move around the country, even if they have tested negative, for leisure.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, introduced plans recently to create a digital certificate that could ease tourism this summer, including internal travel within member states.

“Given that transmission and risk are similar for national and cross-border journeys, member states should ensure there is coherence between the measures applied to the two types of journey,” said Christian Wigand, a commission spokesman.

Opposition politicians in Spain seized on those comments. Some were already accusing the authorities of favoring tourists over residents seeking an Easter getaway.

María Jesús Montero, a minister and spokeswoman for the Spanish government, said last week that the country was doing exactly the same as others in allowing foreign travel but limiting domestic movement.

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