Italy is the original
tourist destination, an open museum for pilgrims, Grand Tourists, foodies,
beach bums and church crawlers. The country – the fifth most visited in the
world, with almost 47 million visitors spending a total of £32bn a year – is
assiduous in promoting tourism. It takes a brave person to turn those kind of
gushing taps off. But in some overwhelmed parts of the country, that is what is
happening.
This week Italian
authorities declared they are going to limit the number of visitors to the
Cinque Terre, a collection of five fishing villages in Liguria. Tourist numbers
will be capped at 1.5 million (a million less than last year) because these
tiny communities are unable to cope with the influx. The announcement follows a
ban last year on huge cruise ships entering the Venetian lagoon.
It’s a
counter-intuitive move, because most tourist destinations want as many visitors
as possible. And it shows up tourism as a Faustian pact: the more visitors you
have and the more money you make, the less you are the naive, folkloric,
authentic, untouched place of the tourists’ imagination.
The defence of tourism
has always been that it “broadens the mind”. We imagine that hanging out with
exotic peoples in unusual places will remove from us any petty provincialism. But
in an age of mass tourism, the interaction with those peoples and places has
lost its depth. Our exchange has become merely commercial.
The observer, of
course, always affects the observed, and travel can ruin the places we come to
see. The nearest tourist attraction to where I live is Glastonbury Tor in
Somerset. It’s a lovely, petite hill with views stretching far over the finest
county in England. But so many people walk it that the path is now made of
concrete, and we’re warned, in a notice at the kissing gate, that we mustn’t
stray. It hardly makes for a stroll amidst nature.
That’s why so many
tourist destinations are brutally dismissive of those they receive. Every
country has a similar term to the West Country’s “grockle” or Spain’s “guiri”:
words which express disdain for these gawking, ungainly visitors.
The most painful recent
example was the toe-curling story of the couple who went to the Maldives to
renew their marriage vows. The hotel charged them £820 for a ceremony in which
hotel staff, speaking Dhivehi which they didn’t understand, viciously insulted
them. That dreadful story captured the weird world of westerners longing for a
paradise, for virginal land; and of locals ripping them off and belittling
them.
Part of the problem is
that our escapism often serves to emphasise the epic inequality in our world.
It’s entirely understandable (especially if you’re from northern Europe) to
chase sunshine and sandy beaches. But then every year we see those
heart-wrenching images of refugees crawling ashore in Lampedusa as Europeans
slap on the sun cream. We are those privileged Europeans, whether we’re in that
photo or not.
We will keep travelling
manically because we’re instinctive wanderers. Curiosity is a good thing, and
it really does open the heart and mind as much as it does the wallet. No one
wants it to end. If the tourism industry stopped existing tomorrow, the global
economy would massively suffer. Tourism accounts for almost a third of the
world’s services.
But maybe we should put
the sandal on the other foot. If we want the right to go anywhere, we should
allow that right to others as well. It can’t just be that only the rich are
permitted to visit, buy properties and lay down roots. If we spend our money in
their countries, surely we have a duty to allow foreigners to earn it in ours
as well. Because until there’s a sense of equality about human movement across
the globe, until tourism implies a sense of actually living alongside other
people, it will remain just a one-night stand.
