There are words that go all the way around and end up, happily, where they began. The word tourist It appeared in 1700s English to name those high-born lads who, after a few years of rainy Oxbridge parties, went down to the sun. They had earned it by being daddy’s boys and, thanks to that, they traveled in carriages “the continent” – France, Italy, sometimes Austria or Greece – visiting ruins, palaces and brothels in what they called the Grand Tour, from which the name tourists and everything else.
Over time, both the rich and the less rich in the rich countries became tourists. Beach resorts, mountains, even museums became the destination of those who could afford them. First, the steamships and trains, and later, of course, airplanes and cars filled certain places with tourists, and now, as we know, there are regions that are overflowing with them.
(We call a tourist someone who travels for no other justification than the trip itself. He does not travel to educate himself or to do business, not to write about it, not to see friends or lovers or enemies or enemy lovers, not to submit to a doctor or a witch doctor or one of those monks; no, tourism is traveling for nothing in particular and so much at the same time. Traveling for the sake of traveling: the trip, let us say, in its purest, most inane form.)
It has been just over half a century since tourism became a decisive “industry” – pardon the pun – and became democratized, within a certain order. Last year, 1.3 billion tourists crossed borders, generated ten percent of the world’s gross product – as much as agriculture or oil – and created one in ten jobs.
In this sweaty industry, Spain is the leader: the second most visited country on the planet, after France, and the first in tourists per inhabitant – and they don’t stop. In 2023, 85 million arrived: the sun, the paella, the sangria, the partying, the smiles and the prices are still unbeatable. Seven or eight million Spaniards make their living from them.
Tourism is a great metaphor for our societies: an impetuous, omnipresent activity that could not exist and nothing would happen. The tourist is a contradictory being, an example of the current model: mass culture with pretensions of exclusivity. The tourist usually believes that he is not a tourist: that he is not like them. The tourist, when he is a tourist and when he is not, disdains tourists. Only that quiet disdain of the local for the tourist has become, lately, something like hatred: the enemy that ruins your life. Or the explosion of proprietary instincts: enough of these strangers who come to use what is mine.
But it is no longer clear what belongs to whom. Tourists force their destinations to look more and more like the image they have of them, to become more typical, more clichéd, more stupid – to give up their peculiarities and changes in order to fit into the postcard. Cultures that become banal, are lost, populations that no longer invent, but ways of serving. And, in a very brutal way, the transformation of the most beautiful neighborhoods of the most sought-after cities into theme parks whose homes are rented by the hour: neighborhoods that lose not only their flavor but also their inhabitants, who cannot pay these prices. Then we react: this cannot continue like this. And the solution that is heard most is to end “mass tourism,” which fills our streets and beaches, in order to recover “quality tourism” – that is, more expensive. “Overcrowding of tourists not only affects the quality of life of those who live in destinations, but also deteriorates the experience of visitors, especially those with greater spending capacity, who could end up avoiding congested destinations,” said a recent column in this newspaper.
The “product” and even the residents must be taken care of, and there is discussion about how to do it: whether to charge a high entrance fee to cities with demand, whether to create a specific tax, whether to close cheap accommodation, whether to prohibit cruise ship passengers and tourists who are skimpy from disembarking.
Solutions are certainly needed, but they all revolve around the same idea: saving our cities – from the poor. It is a variant of the system whereby only expensive and new cars can go to the centre; old and cheap ones cannot. It is the consecration of inequality paved with good intentions: respect, employment, ecology. And it is, ultimately, the recovery of a word: the tourist, at first, was a rich child; now many would like him to be so again.
#word #tourist
