01.08.2024

Nothing to see here

Protests are erupting against overtourism, but the problem is unlikely to go away without fundamental changes to the political economy, argues Paul Demarty

Over the last few months, there has been a scattering of stories in the news covering demonstrations of local people in tourist hotspots around the world, most especially in southern Europe.

From Barcelona to Venice, Mallorca to Athens, the pathologies associated with modern tourism are boiling over. In several Spanish cities, angry locals have taken to spraying tourists with water pistols as a rather desperate form of direct action. Their grievances are diverse: skyrocketing rents, environmental damage, terroristic stag parties, the replacement of local businesses with vapid souvenir stores; the list goes on.

It all seems very familiar to your humble correspondent, I must admit. School is out for the summer and down here in the far south-west of England, our towns are increasingly transformed into luxury staycation resorts. Along with the usual leftie fare stickered to every surface here in Plymouth - Palestine and trans rights flags, Extinction Rebellion hourglasses, and so forth - one finds designs denouncing the encroachments of Airbnb.

And that is just Plymouth, which is still a little downmarket to bear the brunt of the ‘grockles’, as we call them, flooding in our general direction. The Cornish coast is increasingly dominated by the home counties tourist trade (the Cornish call them ‘emmets’, meaning ants; we have never been able to agree with them about anything), which, of course, largely dries up by the end of September. Locals are pushed out of the picturesque places, into downmarket towns nearby.

But these are minor problems compared to those of, say, Venice, whose intrinsically scarce real estate is even more exposed to the distortions of the property market, and which has become a stopping-off point for innumerable vast cruise ships. The cruise ships are the worst actors here, dumping hundreds or thousands of passengers out for 12 hours or less, hardly enough to provide even the dubious benefits of local economic stimulus, but enough to transform the main attractions - places, in theory, of extraordinary beauty - into mobbed-out hell-holes. There is also the small matter of rising sea levels …

This is not to say that various governments have been entirely unresponsive. Venice has limited the number of cruise ships allowed to dock, and it also began charging an entrance fee, at a modest €5 (though some locals are concerned that this rather concedes the transformation of their city into a tacky amusement park). The difficulties are obvious, however: it is not clear what Venice is for, at this point, if not tourism. The local authorities in Amsterdam conducted a large-scale anti-marketing campaign directed at young men, warning them not to come unless they were going to be well-behaved. It is not clear if it worked. But if it did, at least it remains a major European city with financial and industrial sectors. Such measures are not obviously open to the governments of Palma de Mallorca, Venice or St Ives.

Old objections

Objections to mass tourism are in fact as old as the phenomenon itself, which really kicked into gear in the 19th century, with railways and steamships dramatically increasing the mobility of at least the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. The famous ‘grand tour’ of Italy brought the wealthy of the dominant states of the time to what was then a fractious assemblage of statelets and spheres of influence. The visitors found it easy to procure artefacts that ought to have been priceless, but in the poverty of the Italy of the time certainly were not. The modern stereotype of the indolent Italian began to fester in the English (and French, and later American) mind. The steady growth of Alpine tourism from the mid-1850s aggravated those German Romantics most committed to the love of nature.

At that time, however, international and long-distance travel remained a minority pursuit. Tourism among the popular classes was more localised (pilgrimages aside). The growth of the railways in Britain, for example, produced the grand ring of seaside resort towns, from Scarborough to Brighton to Bournemouth to Bangor. What were, for the most part, small fishing villages became grand attractions. Brighton’s population began the 19th century at around 7,500, and ended it at 120,000, having acquired vast hotels, piers and a whole economy - legal and illegal - dedicated to offering travellers from London a good time, for a fair price.

That began to change in the later 20th century, as air travel became dramatically cheaper. Foreign holidays crept into the reach of the popular classes. This proved lethal for many of the once thriving British resort towns - why suffer the drizzle and the silty Severn water at Weston-Super-Mare if you could just as easily be in Mallorca? The strange half-existence of the tourist trap was instead concentrated in the sunniest places within easy reach of the chillier northern European nations - now able to visit Spain, Greece and so on rather more easily. English and German tourists began to battle over scarce Spanish beach-space like a sunburnt rematch of the Somme. It is these kinds of tourists that vex the Mallorcans and Greeks, at least in the most ‘beachy’ destinations.

Cheap flights, however, equally enabled a different kind of tourism - a sort of stunted, distant cousin of the original Grand Tour: the city break. There are more and less elevated versions of this - at one end, the wild Prague stag-do, and at the other, the desperate completism of the part-time culture vulture, trying to take in all the major museums of Paris in three days. There is a certain completism afoot in the culture at large, these days: the need to ‘do’ the Louvre because it is on one’s ‘bucket list’, as if it were a Pokémon to be collected.

That is bad enough from the point of view of actual aesthetic experience, but, combined with the endless contemporary incentives to self-documentation, the result is tourism as a kind of exhibitionist fantasy - you do not look at the art, so much as try to be looked at looking at the art. Pity the poor fool trying to actually enjoy the Monets in the Musée d’Orsay, squinting through a crowd of wannabe influencers pouting for their friends’ iPhone cameras. (Fortunately, nobody seems to try this with the Toulouse-Lautrecs.)

People spend so much time looking forward to their holidays (which we will discuss later) that it is easy to miss the fact that they are so often disappointing. Your getaway to a Greek island lands you on a beach more crowded than Leicester Square on a Saturday afternoon. Your stag party ends in a fight and a night in the cells. Your zeal for self-enrichment means you never really see any beautiful object you put your face in front of for a few desultory seconds.

Meanwhile, the places you visit become dead zones. They must continue the pretence of being the places that were worth visiting in the first place - the quaint fishing village, the bustling Bohemian metropolis. Yet these were not arrangements of buildings and natural features, but also of people - the people who are edged out. The Venetians are right to worry: tourism turns everything into an immersive theme park - a version of the fake peasant village in the gardens of Versailles, where Marie Antoinette and her highborn friends would play-act at rustic life.

The most recent disadvantage for the actual ‘peasants’ has come in the form of Airbnb, which in practice monopolises a scam whereby houses and apartments theoretically zoned for people to actually live in are instead used as an investment vehicle. Day for day, holiday lets will net you much more money in rent than permanent tenants. Why, then, have your second home on the market for mere ordinary people in the locality? Blaming Airbnb is somewhat off the point - it is merely the most egregious phenomenon of the underlying trend for whole economies to be put at the service of the financial sector, and in many countries merely to keep property asset prices on a permanent upward trajectory. In Britain in particular, this has become the all-purpose substitute for general economic health.

Fixing tourism

The denizens of the world’s tourist traps, then, have a great deal to complain about. Going around super-soaking random tourists is, nonetheless, a hopeless cause. Suppose it actually had the desired effect of halving the numbers of tourists in Barcelona - these sharpshooters would still be at the mercy of their landlords. Indeed, most of their ‘victims’ are in the same position back home; the details differ, but there is remarkable commonality of grievance and thus the potential for solidarity at least. It is a pity to waste that potential and, while tourists do not vote in Catalan elections, these problems are in fact - as we have argued - effects of quite global dynamics of political economy and culture that cannot be fixed locally.

Barcelona could at least survive it: it remains, like Paris and Amsterdam, a major city that does more than entertain tourists. The problem for Venice and the seasonal towns of Cornwall is that there is nothing much else left. Thinking of their problems as ones of ‘overtourism’ is true enough, but we should also look at the issue through the other end of the telescope, bearing in mind the ‘undertourism’ of abandoned resorts like modern Hastings or Ramsgate. Really unshackling these places from the whims of visitors would mean having them do something else.

This is certainly painfully obvious here in the south-west. The holidaymaker in St Ives will, sooner or later, find herself on Wharf Road, weaving around other pedestrians and creeping cars. It is picturesque (and famously a popular subject for painters): the quayside of a fishing town. Yet there is one thing missing: fishermen. The toney restaurants get their seafood from elsewhere. Walking out from other such towns, one often comes across the ruins of tin mines - the death of that industry being a very real grievance even a century later. Moderating the influence of the tourist trade is inseparable from building some kind of economic life apart from tourism: something that will even allow you to say ‘no’ in the first place.

That is the grain of truth in the just-so story told by the likes of Tony Blair and, across the pond, Barack Obama, that people need to be reskilled for the ‘new’ economy; that, in the contemporary cliché, unemployed fishermen need to ‘learn to code’. (Indeed, the fibre-optic cables that connect us to the American internet make landfall in Bude …) In the hands of such people, of course, the point becomes purely apologetic. Instead, there needs to be a ‘new economy’ that provides a meaningful life for people in more than a few cities in a particular country.

So much for the ‘supply side’ of the overtourism problem - but much the same may be said for the demand side. There is much wrong with Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s account of the “culture industry”, but one of their more perceptive observations is the tendency for the working day to produce, as its complement, leisure time as an increasingly regimented period away from work: something that becomes a mere necessity rather than a positive opportunity for relaxation, play and enjoyment.

An economy that did not work some half to death and leave others in unemployment and penury, we expect, would simply need fewer beach holidays, because daily life itself would be far less enervating. Its cultural life would not devolve into a giant checklist of officially important things to see and go through - and so, instead of skidding lightly across a hundred cities, we could fall in love with - indeed, live in - a few. We could be less like tourists, and more like locals.