What we gain from mass tourism

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Mass tourism, we are often told, is bad, bad, bad. Bad for local communities swamped by throngs of sweaty foreigners. Bad for a planet choking on jet fumes. Bad even for the tourists themselves, who tromp in the thousands through crowded museums and onto packed tour buses, seeing everything and learning nothing.

Is this indictment really fair? I am not so sure.

I am part of the travelling horde myself right now, visiting Portugal and Spain. Both welcome millions of visitors every year.

After decades of being a little off the main track for international tourism, Portugal is enjoying a huge boom just now. Everyone seems to be going.

In Lisbon, they pile onto riverboats for tours up the Tagus, oohing and aahing at sights like the Belém Tower, the 16th-century folly that greeted Portuguese explorers when they returned from epic voyages. In Porto, they line up to see a gorgeous old bookstore or pile out of their buses to visit cavernous port cellars and ponder whether they prefer tawny, ruby or white.

Global tourism has come roaring back since the pandemic began to ease. Close to a billion people travelled outside their home countries in the first nine months of last year, up by more than a third from 2022. After the dark days of COVID-19, when borders closed and many tour operators went out of business, guides, restaurateurs and handicraft sellers are in clover again.

With the returning masses has come a familiar inventory of complaints about their impact. Venetians complain that they clog the city’s narrow streets and lanes, scattering trash in their wake. This month authorities will start asking visitors to pay a €5 fee to enter the city on busy days.

Hong Kongers look down their noses at the herds of tourists from mainland China who arrive on budget tours to march around the shopping districts and crowd into noisy dim sum restaurants. Citizen groups in the Canary Islands are planning protests over a tide of holidaymakers they blame for overcrowding and soaring rents. One of them has adopted the slogan Canarias se exhausta (the Canary Islands are exhausted).

But against the troubles and annoyances that arise from mass tourism must be placed the undoubted benefits. Bloomberg reports that tourism will add a record US$11-trillion to the global economy in 2024. That will rise to US$16-trillion 10 years from now. One person out of 10 has a job somehow related to tourism.

It is not just rich-world destinations such as London, Rome or Paris that are making hay. Poorer places such as Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Cambodia and Mexico are drawing rising numbers of visitors with their cultural and natural wonders.

Porto was once a rather shabby industrial city with a glorious past. Tourism has allowed it to spruce itself up. The proceeds help pay for the renewal, restoration and maintenance of its splendid parks and grand monuments.

Exactly 50 years after the fall of its long-ruling dictatorship, Portugal is enjoying a renaissance. It has many splendours to show the world. Why sneer at those who come to see them?

One argument against mass tourism is that it is mainly a privilege of the well-to-do. That is no longer the case. Middle-income countries with hundreds of millions of newly middle-class people are part of what is driving the phenomenon. Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, Poles – they all want to go up the Eiffel Tower and take a boat ride along the Grand Canal. They have every right.

It is too easy to dismiss modern tourists as a vulgar mob. Many of them simply want to see the world. If they are more interested in posting a selfie at the Trevi Fountain than exploring Roman history, so be it. They may learn something despite themselves.

They may develop a new admiration for other nationalities and what they have done to advance human civilization. They may learn that today’s world is the result of endless mixing (and often conflict) between peoples and cultures, a lesson impossible to miss in the Iberian Peninsula. They may realize that they are not actually that different from people who come from other countries, despite the current trend toward division and conflict.

Everyone wants a gelato break. Everyone loves looking at the light pour through the circular opening in the dome of the Pantheon. Everyone wonders how on Earth it was possible to build something like the Great Wall by hand. Whether you are travelling from Santiago or Winnipeg or Cape Town, it is a pain to have a bored teenager or a cranky toddler on your hands – but a delight to see the teenager stop to gaze at a portrait by Rembrandt or watch the toddler chase soap bubbles through a sunny European plaza.

One tour group we joined in Granada included visitors from Switzerland, Belgium, Florida, Denmark, France and Greece. Everyone seemed equally awed by the Alhambra. All that beauty. All that cruelty. The duality of humankind expressed in stone.

Today’s mass tourism is often described as an invasion. It is better to think of it as a pilgrimage. Instead of travelling to the tomb of a saint, most 21st-century tourists travel to marvel at the glories of our world, both ancient and modern. It would be a shame to see a snobbish backlash rob them of the experience.