The great American writer Paul Theroux once said: “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been; travellers don’t know where they’re going.”
This multi-layered statement highlights the profound questions created by our ability to travel anywhere at a keyboard click and about our voyeuristic, fleeting and selfish interest in many of the places we visit – some of us, purely for the “Insta”. It also reveals elitist snobbery: distinguishing between traveller and tourist, sneering at the latter, just like the thousands who demonstrated against tourists in Barcelona at the weekend.
Those campaigning Catalans squirting bemused visitors with water pistols on La Rambla joined the ranks of locals from Malaga to Mallorca, Venice to Bali and even Mount Fuji in Japan railing against the sheer volume of tourists.
Unfortunate Venetians confronted with those hideous giant cruise ships surely have a point. But in reality, it’s not always so simple. Particularly in Spain and the Balearics, the protest is as much about the quality of the tourist as it is the quantity. It includes the thorny subject of holiday rentals. And most of all, that Spanish, Italian and Japanese tourists make it almost impossible to move around areas of Central London, Windsor and the Cotswolds for much of the year.
A teacher should not say this, but who wouldn’t want to wield a water pistol at a gormless gang of feral French schoolkids clogging up the exit from Leicester Square tube?
When I taught English as a Foreign Language as a student, I accompanied 30 teenage terrors on a trip to central London. Did they want to go to the British Museum or National Gallery? Pas du tout! They all met back at Oxford Circus with green hair and mini Big Ben bells.
Should we stop working-class French, Italian, Spanish pupils from visiting? Of course not. But that’s what the snobbery underpinning the protests abroad suggests in reverse. It’s the happy hour-loving, cheap beer-swilling, tattooed, working-class Brits that they wish to deter.
Two years ago, the outgoing boss of Visit Cornwall slammed “bloody tourists” who “don’t get” Cornwall, referring to us as “f***ing emmets” (olde English for ants). It epitomises the hostility I experience whenever I cross the Tamar. But as my friend who has a house near St Ives says, she gives business to a cleaner, housekeeper, gardener and all manner of local tradespeople and shopkeepers. What would they do if the tourists did not come? The same applies to Malaga as well as Bali.
The elephant in the room is holiday rentals. How can young people born in Rock, St Ives or Ibiza ever afford to buy a home of their own locally? They should blame the generation who happily rented out their homes, which encourages outsiders to buy homes that they also then rent out. This happens not only in Polzeath, but Barcelona, Lisbon and anywhere locals can make a fast buck out of the same tourists they deride and that they themselves become when they travel.
Venice aside, the whole protest stinks of snobbery and hypocrisy.