No, it’s not just your imagination.

Many of the 1.6 million residents of Barcelona can be a bit abrupt. A bit impatient. A bit aggrieved.

Those conditions can be the product of decades and decades under the thumb (in their telling) of the Spanish capital, Madrid.

More recently, it has been about the inundation, over the past quarter-century, of Barcelona by tourists.

–On the one hand, tourism now accounts for 12 percent of the economic activity in Barcelona — up from 2 percent in 1992, the year the city hosted the Summer Olympics.

Barcelona had 8.2 million “overnight visitors” in 2016, according to Mastercard, putting them 12th in the world in that category.  Bangkok, London, Paris, Dubai and New York were Nos. 1-5.

–On the other hand, that surge in tourist dollars comes with perceived costs — rising housing prices for Barcelona natives and a sense of the city being overrun by outsiders several months a year.

I began looking into this topic after seeing several signs hanging from balconies in residential neighborhoods which carried essentially the same message. One of the messages, spray-painted on a bed sheet, read: “Tourism hurts the city.”

While in Barcelona, I have thought, several times, “I would not want to live in this neighborhood” — because of the clustering of tourists in several areas. Particularly near the docks where the cruise ships disgorge thousands of visitors in a few hours, and La Rambla, and in the neighborhood around the Sagrada Familia.

Even lesser-known areas like the pedestrian-only Carrer Blei, which features maybe 30 tapas bars, can approach gridlock. (Which we contributed to, admittedly.)

The opposition to tourists seems most keen in the housing sector as property owners increasingly push out renters to turn their holdings into short-stay apartments for tourists, which are far more lucrative.

We can vouch for this: That housing costs in Barcelona, even for tourists, have climbed steadily over the six or seven years covering a time frame when we visited the city at least four times. Over the weekend, we stayed in a seven-story building where every room was being rented to visitors.

Barcelona natives, who seem to prefer to be the capital of an independent country of Catalonia, might have “edgy” as a default setting. Barcelona was a Republican stronghold until the final days of the Spanish Civil War and endured decades of Franco rule in which the use of the Catalan language (something about midway between French and Spanish) was proscribed.

Then all these tourists arrive, very few of whom speak Catalan. A few more of the tourists will know some Spanish, which also makes the Catalans wince, because to many of them Spanish is the language of the oppressors based in Madrid.

In our experience, these are not major issues, or we would not be returning to the city on such a regular basis.

But the sense of gritted teeth, of cooped-up resentment … yes, you can sense it sometimes. And if we notice it among restaurant workers and taxi drivers, how does the mass of the native population feel?

Certainly, they must weigh the balance between the 8.2 million tourists and the money they bring … and how their lives have changed in the past couple of decades and wonder if they have made a wise choice.