Letters from readers: The tourism “assembly line”

Europe has become the mecca of international tourism. Clear! It is not for less: it constitutes the cradle of Western culture. Now, I propose to do an exercise in imagination. Let’s see. First, let’s isolate the myriad of tours on that continent. Second, let’s add to that imaginary abstraction all the most developed tourist and logistics infrastructure on the planet. Third, let us call all this vast sample of tours, entertainment and services —type shopping or amusement park, although of continental dimensions—, for the purposes of this work, “Euroland”. So, we would get a “new world” within the “Old World”. Euroland would be, metaphorically speaking, like a tourist caricature of Europe. The massive influx of tourists arriving from all corners of the globe circulates, preferably, along pre-established circuits, wandering through a kind of high-productivity tourist “assembly line”, where they try to see more in the shortest possible time. Much of European art and its monuments reflect a feeling, a spirituality, the effort of its authors, the admiration of the centuries: things that it is necessary to be able to contemplate with time and intensity, that permeate our souls —and not our photos—, and that cannot be attached to a simple souvenir. In the same way, many other destinations in the world, schematically, begin to resemble each other. Therefore, these areas, when denatured, become artificial sectors, which disconnect the tourist from the real world. The recipe is not new: Disneyland, in the United States, continues to be the tiny model that the tourism industry is managing to globalize.