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22 Apr 2023: The world’s most perfect places are being turned into backdrops for our tourist selfies
The world’s most perfect places are being turned into backdrops for our tourist selfies
Tobias
Jones
Italy depends on tourism but despairs at the hordes
who descend on its beauty spots. Its solutions are being watched around the
globe
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Sat 22 Apr
2023 13.31 EDT
Last week
Italy was, again, struggling with the conundrum of mass tourism. One of the
country’s most charming seaside towns, Portofino, has just introduced
legislation to dissuade tourists lingering for selfies: there will be fines of
up to €275 (£243) if they block traffic or pedestrians in two “red zones” of
the beautiful bay.
It’s the
latest in a series of draconian measures adopted by Italian councils to deal
with herds of holidaymakers: there are fines of up to €2,500 for walking the
paths above the Cinque Terre (five villages in Liguria) in flip-flops or
sandals; you are no longer allowed to eat snacks outside in the centre of
Venice or in four central streets in Florence; you can be fined €250 just for
sitting down on Rome’s Spanish Steps; and one beach, in Eraclea, has even
banned the building of sandcastles (maximum fine €250) because they’re
considered unnecessary obstructions.
Italy, of
course, more or less invented the concept of tourism: as a cradle of ancient
civilisation and Renaissance splendour, the peninsula became de rigueur for
aesthetes and aristocrats. The famous “Grand Tour” was born in the 17th century
and ever since then tourism has been vital to the Italian economy: pre-Covid,
the country received 65 million visitors a year and, according to the Bank of
Italy, tourism (considered in the widest sense) represented 13% of the country’s
GDP.
But Italy,
so dependent on tourism, is also beginning to despair of it. Last week, a new
display was introduced in a bookshop in Venice that reveals, painfully and in
real time, the number of beds available in the city to tourists: at 48,596 (and
counting), it is perilously close to overtaking the number of residents in the
city: 49,365 (and falling). As recently as 2008, the respective figures were
12,000 and 60,000.
So a city
that is famously concerned about drowning in water is now more fretful about
drowning in humans. In January, Venice even introduced an entrance fee (varying
between €3 and €10) to access the city and its islands. The move wasn’t
controversial because it monetised tourism – that has always happened – but
because it made the city appear precisely what it is trying to avoid becoming:
a theme park, a time capsule for gawking, snap-happy visitors, more a relic
than actually alive.
The problem
is that mass tourism is turning destinations into the opposite of what they
once were. The attraction of the Cinque Terre is their stunning simplicity:
they have no great monuments as such, neither grand cathedrals nor castles,
just a sense of serenity, of human ingenuity and topographical grandeur (the
steep mountains, terraced and criss-crossed by paths where possible, host
pastel houses perched above an azure sea).
But the
serenity and simplicity can’t survive millions of wham-bam visitors a year. Two
weeks ago, Fabrizia Pecunia, the mayor of one of the five villages,
Riomaggiore, complained: “It’s no longer possible to postpone the debate about
how to handle tourist flows. If we don’t [find a solution], our days as a
tourist destination are numbered.” What tourist hot spots most yearned for a
decade or two ago – high numbers, influx and flows – is precisely what is now
causing them problems. During the peak season, the Balearic island of Mallorca
now has more than 1,000 flights landing every day.
The World
Tourism Organization predicts that by the end of this decade the flow of
international tourists will surpass 2 billion. What’s called “overtourism” is
already so acute that popular destinations are now doing the unthinkable, and
actively trying to dissuade or block arrivals. Last month, Amsterdam launched
“stay away” ads aimed at badly behaved Brits. The Greek island of Santorini, a
mere 29 square miles, had to cap cruise ship passengers to 8,000 a day in 2017.
Venice has blocked cruise ships and, in 2012, the anti-tourism message proved a
winning formula for a mayoral candidate in Barcelona.
Now the
road is so designated that you feel forced through a well-oiled funnel as
someone picks your pockets
But if the
tourism boom is often bad for locals, it’s equally depressing for visitors. The
fiction of tourism in the social media age is that we, as rugged adventurers,
are there by ourselves. But we’re only alone for that Instagram money shot. The
rest is full of crowds and discomfort. When a friend of mine foolishly went to
the Cinque Terre at Easter, there were long queues just to get on the footpaths
or to drink a coffee. She then had to queue for three hours just to board one
of the rickety trains home.
Anyone who
has been to Niagara Falls, say, or Stonehenge knows that natural or human
wonders have been mercilessly monetised. It now costs, for example, €34 to
visit the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia. Visitors to famous sites often come
away feeling not uplifted, but fleeced by car-park charges, entry prices, food
stalls and so on. We’re bemused by the inauthenticity of the experience. Travel
used to be about adventure and hardship, sometimes solitude, but invariably
surprise and spontaneity. Now the road is so well-trodden and designated that
you feel forced through a well-oiled funnel as someone picks your pockets.
But the
sense of unease goes deeper. In the past we travelled to broaden and educate
the mind. Travellers suffered discomfort – a mule over the Alps, a clipper
across the Bay of Biscay – to absorb the wideness of the world, to feel small
or vulnerable perhaps, and to allow the learning of other cultures to
infiltrate their beings. Now, it seems, all that is reversed: there’s minimal
danger or risk to travel, and our big egos are imposed on a small world. Sites
are nothing more than the backdrop for our selfies because we go places not to
learn from them, but just to post and boast to others that we’ve been there.
Tobias Jones lives in Parma. His latest book is The Po: An Elegy for Italy’s Longest Ri
The good tourist: can we learn to travel without absolutely infuriating the locals?
Overtourism
and the climate crisis
The good
tourist: can we learn to travel without absolutely infuriating the locals?
Author
Paige McClanahan says there is a way to be your best self abroad – it starts by
visiting fewer places and spending longer there. Can her approach end the
growing anger around overtourism?
By Zoe
Williams
Mon 19 Aug
2024 05.00 BST
Tourism has
never had a great reputation, given that the very word “tourist” is pejorative.
At best, it suggests someone whose interest is superficial and whose
understanding of a place is nonexistent. What’s the first thing you think, when
you hear the phrase, “They’re a bit of a tourist”? You think, that person is
annoying. But the word’s reputation has plummeted further in recent years.
Anti-tourism movements are springing up across the world: that might look like
a protest march, as in Barcelona, where one placard bluntly pleaded “Tourists
go home; you are not welcome here”. It might look like a visitor fee, as Venice
introduced this year, or it might look like the mayor of Amsterdam simply
closing the cruise ship terminal, as he did last year.
Part of this
is about sheer volume: the number of people crossing an international border as
tourists (rather than displaced people or migrants) in 2023 was 1.3 billion,
which is not only a complete bounceback post-Covid, but an almost 25-fold
increase since the 1950s. Driven not only by flights becoming ever more
affordable, but the online convenience of booking travel – from the launch of
last-minute flight and hotel brokers in the late 90s, to Airbnb in the late
00s, followed by Google Flights and Trips – everything about travel has become
easier and cheaper. But the difficulties and costs still exist, they’re just
paid elsewhere. Tourism accounts for just over 8% of all global greenhouse gas
emissions. Short-term holiday rentals distort housing markets until the locals
are spending summer months living in car parks – as has happened in Ibiza.
And that’s
just the aggregate impact of tourism, before any of us have arrived and started
doing anything. Dubrovnik in Croatia has new rules about not jumping in
fountains or climbing on statues and not walking around shirtless. Amsterdam
launched a “stay away” advertising campaign (specifically aimed at the British,
shamingly). Budapest, Munich, Dusseldorf and Prague all banned “beer-bikes”,
those 17-seat charabancs where stag parties pedal their way to oblivion. Split
has introduced specific fines for vomiting and urinating in public (again,
those signs are in English). The Italian culture minister, meanwhile, has
simply had enough of people defacing the Colosseum.
When you
look at anti-tourism movements as a whole, it’s hard to escape the conclusion
that travel is one of those nice things we no longer deserve. But into that
sorry picture steps the travel journalist Paige McClanahan with her book The
New Tourist. We can still travel, she says, and more than that, it’s important
that we do; we just have to get a lot better at it.
The old kind
of tourist, she writes, is “a pure consumer who sees the people and places he
encounters when he travels as nothing more than a means to some self-serving
end: an item crossed off a bucket list, a fun shot for his Instagram grid, one
more thing to brag about to his peers”. The new tourist, by contrast, is
humbled by the unfamiliar, not unsettled by it, she “embraces the chance to
encounter people whose backgrounds are very different to her own, and to learn
from cultures or religions that she might otherwise fear or regard with
contempt”. Maybe that doesn’t sound groundbreaking – in brief, when you’re
away, try being your best self – but it cuts to the heart of a book that is
part a modern history of international travel, part manifesto for it.
Fundamentally,
McClanahan sees travel as a social good. “When we think about the challenges
humanity is going to face in the years and decades to come, whether it’s
another pandemic, runaway AI or catastrophic climate change, each of these
crises is completely ignorant of national borders,” she says. “Should we all
just sit at home, is that going to prepare us? No, we need high-quality,
meaningful interactions that are going to shift our perspectives and deepen our
understanding of what it means to be a human being in such an interconnected
world.”
However, we
can’t just carry on as we are. The term “overtourism” was coined in 2016 by
Skift, a travel news outlet, with Iceland as its poster child. After the
country’s financial crash of the late 00s, the income from tourism became
hugely important, partly as a way of paying off a massive IMF loan. But
visitors come at a cost, whether it’s the destruction of moss and grassland
from the footfall, or the new pressure on the road infrastructure when an
island with a population of about 350,000 began seeing more than 2 million
tourists by the end of 2017. McClanahan interviewed the former first lady of
Iceland, Eliza Reid, for her book, who told her that she and her partner, the
then president, Guðni Jóhannesson, walked through the middle of Reykjavik on a summer
day in 2017. “And nobody recognised him, because there were no Icelanders
there. It was all tourists.”
That sense
of heavily visited areas being denatured, left unrecognisable when the
resident:visitor ratio is out of whack, was compounded after the pandemic. It
wasn’t so much that tourists brought Covid (although they did); rather, that
the international travel bans made people realise, as they did in other places
such as Hawaii, “just how much they had been sacrificing for tourists for so
long”, McClanahan says. It was assumed that people in tourism-heavy areas in
Hawaii would be pining for travel bans to be lifted after so much income was
lost during the pandemic, but the peace and quiet turned out to be much more
valuable in some places. In polls, native Hawaiian community leaders and young
people were the least likely to agree that tourism did more good than harm. At
the end of a Hawaii tourism conference McClanahan attended, one participant
stood up and said: “‘Tourism is colonialism. Tourists need to go home now,’”
McClanahan remembers. “And I thought, ‘That’s my dude.’” It could be an
Instagram post perpetuating colonial stereotypes (she is unflinchingly
self-critical about this: “For example, Paige standing alone in a Cambodian
ruin,” she cites as an example) or it could be visitor demand simply remaking
the culture into a theme park, boom boxes and novelty penny farthings where
real life should be happening.
I suggest to
McClanahan that, from Hawaii to Mallorca, what residents are rebelling against
is as much late capitalism as it is tourists: historically, the inconvenience
of having vastly more visitors a year than there are residents has been offset
by what this does for the local economy. But, if the fruits, one way or
another, aren’t evenly distributed – maybe the model drives a low-wage culture,
maybe intermediaries such as cruise companies or Airbnb cream off the profit –
that contract is bust and resentment creeps in on both sides. I remember this
from going to Tulum in Mexico two years ago. It’s a chic tourist hotspot where
a cab driver would happily relieve you of $30 to go 200 metres down the road. I
felt pretty sour about that, but he probably felt pretty sour about me spending
eight times as much on a single plate of food as the hourly rate of the person
who served it to me. McClanahan agrees that “daytrippers to Venice, people
coming off a cruise to buy a postcard and an ice-cream and then leave” might
fit into that picture, but it’s possible to travel while staying “socially
conscious and socially aware”: spend more time in a place, not at the height of
the season, and spend money in local businesses.
The first
chapter of The New Tourist goes back to how we got here: 50 years ago, when
newlyweds Tony and Maureen Wheeler set off from the south of England to drive
to India. They weren’t the first to try the hippy trail, but they were the
first to launch a publishing empire off the back of it: Lonely Planet. Many of
us who took our first trips as adults holding one of these guides will remember
the sensibility of them: it was all about budget travel, getting in and out of
a place on a fiver. The Wheelers changed the terms of tourism entirely – the
true traveller didn’t waltz in like Lady Muck, paying top dollar for
everything. This new kind of tourist liked to be called a “traveller” and went
to out-of-the-way places, craving the authenticity of the locals’ experience,
not luxury.
But this had
its downsides, namely that these “travellers” had the same footprint but a lot
less money. No offence – and this is my opinion, not McClanahan’s – the
Wheelers made an absolute fortune off performative non-materialism and lauded
being “off the beaten track”, while beating every track so hard you could see
the tracks from space.
Lonely
Planet guides, by the turn of this century, had become more about the high end,
but there is a broader tension, which McClanahan exemplifies with Bhutan –
where you pay a really sizeable visitor sustainable development tax of $100 a
person every day – versus Nepal, the “backpacker’s superhighway”. “In Bhutan,”
she says, “you had to come with an organised tour and had to be led by a local
tour guide. They were very explicitly going for lower volume, higher quality
tourism.” She felt plugged in to Bhutan, “saw villages that felt untouched”
(tourism in Bhutan has existed, in tiny numbers, since 1974); Nepal, heaving
with visitors, didn’t come close, “although the landscapes were beautiful, of
course”. It would be crude, though, to make that into a creed that you should
only travel if you’re loaded. Maybe, rather, it means start by going to places
where they want you. “For every Barcelona or Venice pushing back against
tourism,” McClanahan says, “there are so many other places that are working as
hard as they can to attract tourists.” Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Rwanda and Japan all
have active state programmes to increase tourist numbers.
McClanahan’s
first law of new tourism is a simple one: “Travel to fewer places, and spend
longer there. Understand that this might be the only time in your life that you
have the opportunity to see this landscape, this wildlife, to come and meet
these people.” Travel, as she describes it, comes with a “tinge of nostalgia, a
bitter-sweetness” even while you’re doing it. “Part of its bliss is that you
may never come back, and even if you do, you will never re-experience this
moment.”
But don’t go
looking for bitter-sweetness: McClanahan talks about “last chance” tourism –
people rushing to Victoria Falls, the Great Barrier Reef, Venice – which are
all at risk, respectively from drought; marine debris and rising sea
temperatures; and rising sea levels – looking for the last perfect selfie in
front of the extremities of a dying planet. It sounds so self-defeating and,
more than that, depressing, that it’s impossible to imagine people still doing
that. But we can see that people are still doing that.
And while
many countries are entering into explicit contracts with visitors to meet the
challenges of the climate crisis, not all of these are particularly helpful. In
Palau in the western pacific, you will receive a pledge stamp in your passport
that will give you special access to places if you buy reef-safe sunscreen. In
Denmark, there’s a trial initiative called Copenpay, in which tourists might
get a free boat trip for picking up litter, or a free drink if you cycle to a
bar instead of driving. It’s a creative way to connect tourists to the place
they’re in, but it all underlines how hard it is to truly mitigate your carbon
footprint as a tourist: cycling through Copenhagen won’t make a lot of
difference if you arrived there by plane.
McClanahan
is more plausible than most tech-optimists on the aviation front. “The
technology for carbon-free travel already exists,” she says. “It’s not being
deployed at anything like the scale needed, and we all need to educate
ourselves, as consumers and as voters, about the transformation and the speed
that we need. Whether it’s through electric flight, whether it’s
hydrogen-powered flight, whether it’s through a hydrocarbon fuel that is made
from carbon dioxide, extracted from the atmosphere, this technology exists,
these planes have flown. It’s a question of being able to do it at the scale
required to make an actual impact on the atmosphere.” On the climate crisis, as
with all the ethical challenges tourism faces, McClahanan urges us to consider
the counter-factual. There isn’t a simple fix, such as “stop doing it”.
As the old
TomTom satnav adverts used to say, you’re not in traffic, you are traffic. If
you’ve travelled somewhere where you can see overtourism, you’re an
overtourist. Yet “there’s a wonderful amount of humility that we gain from
getting out of our comfort zone”, McClanahan says. “We just need to learn to do
it differently.”
The New Tourist by Paige McClanahan is out now
published by Simon & Schuster.
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