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Humans are a nomadic species, in search of new fruit trees, more fertile fields or new horizons. Agriculture and sedentism are a brief episode in the long history of mankind, a social accident that brought property, inequality, frontiers and conflict. Also, it is true, writing, peace and community . But although we have been essentially a sedentary species since Neolithic times, travel has been part of the collective yearnings of all civilisations. Modern tourism gives shape to this myth thanks to the shortening of distances by the railway and the steamship and a collective imagination propagated by Romanticism. Capitalist society, hegemonic after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has incorporated tourism into the catalogue of middle-class consumer goods.
The UN Tourism forecasts that by 2030, international tourist trips will reach the threshold of 1.8 billion and domestic trips will increase from 7 billion to 16 billion. This “big bang” is the result of an increase in leisure time among the middle classes in developed countries , and above all of the creation of new middle classes in the peripheral countries. By 2030 there will be an average of two tourist trips per person per year in the world, but this average hides a huge inequality between people who spend most of their existence within a very limited perimeter and the new urban classes who have made travel a status symbol.
The tourism implosion of this new century gives rise to three central tensions. Firstly, tourism aggravates the climate emergency and the most severe environmental problems, such as water scarcity, plastic waste, or energy consumption. We know that a tourist consumes more water, generates more waste and needs more energy than a local. Furthermore, tourist travel is based on fossil fuels, whether by car for short distances or by plane for long distances. The emissions generated to move tourists to the city of Barcelona from their places of origin are three times higher than the emissions of the city as a whole, four times higher if we consider cruise ships.
The second tension is that the concentration of tourists in certain areas causes secondary effects on access to housing, density of urban spaces, the trivialisation of landscapes, the loss of residential fabric or local commerce, and inflation. If tourism grows beyond the territory’s capacity to absorb this demand, it unbalances the receiving area, transforms the nature of landscapes and alters the local economy, social relations and cultural elements. Finally, new tourism is characterised by a certain discrediting, a devaluation of tourism in the social stock market.
It is possible that we are witnessing the last stage of a spasmodic form of tourism. A change in habits and a certain discrediting of conventional tourism are helping, but the main factor of transformation is another: transport has become part of the decarbonisation strategy and is a central focus of EU policy. The most likely scenario will be an appreciable increase in the cost of distance. We will put an end to the fiction of a near-zero cost that has created the absurdity of Mediterranean tourists in the Caribbean or one-day stays thanks to low-cost flights. When the distance cost is increased, two complementary processes take place: the distance tends to be shortened and the stay lengthens.
Slowness. The fate of tourism is likely to depend on its ability to recapture the value of slowness, the antithesis of today’s society: fast, fleeting, ephemeral. Slowing down allows us to discover the details, the complexity, the diversity (of landscape), which moves away from the instant summary of the guidebook. Secondly, it allows us to understand the essential, to move from superficiality to depth, to connect with the place more intensely, to listen to the geography, to dialogue with the landscape. Selfie culture has created rituals that have distanced the subjects from the objects, which have been reduced to a collection of signifiers without meaning, of signs without meaning beyond their aesthetic value. And, finally, a denser tourism allows for the recovery of the personal journey, because, after all, the ultimate objective of any tourist itinerary is to leave the ordinary space and reconnect with the extraordinary. And this takes time and, it should be said, silence.
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