In 1494, when the Spanish crafted the Treaty of Tordesillas, claiming dominion over the New World and launching their colonisation of the Americas — with scant regard for the indigenous people of those lands — they could scarcely have imagined that half a millennia later, they would be grappling with a troubling reversal (of sorts): Millions of foreign tourists flooding their cities.
Earlier this month, thousands of protestors descended on the streets of Barcelona expressing ire against burgeoning tourism. With visitors outnumbering residents nearly 20 to one (as per official 2023 figures), the protests were intended to highlight the travails of local citizens battling escalating living expenses — for which they blamed the torrent of vacationers inundating their iconic city.
Waving placards and chanting slogans, they are reported to have brandished water pistols and taken aim at holidaying diners. While many tourists were understandably alarmed, one imagines this demonstration would have left the American and Indian travellers quite unperturbed. After all, the former are more than accustomed to seeing guns in public and the latter make a festival out of spraying strangers with coloured water. Nevertheless, the furore in Barcelona has attracted much international attention and brought to focus an emerging issue in the modern era: The problem of overtourism.
Travel for leisure has never been as prevalent — and democratised — as it is now. Economic and scientific advancements have enabled millions to turn their dreams of seeing distant shores into reality. In the age of social media and long-haul flights, no corner of the globe has been left undiscovered or unreachable. When you are planning a trip, the world is, quite literally, your oyster. And yet, ironically, of the limitless possibilities available on the map, vacation goals tend to converge on a handful of coordinates. With more and more people following in the footsteps of travel influencers and flocking to the most sought-after Instagram-able locations, a vicious cycle is set into motion.
Last year, a National Geographic article cited a French study noting that “80 per cent of travellers visit just 10 per cent of the world’s tourism destinations”. From Venice to the Great Barrier Reef, and Kyoto to Hallstatt in Austria, residents in these coveted locales have become increasingly more vocal about the adverse effects of untrammelled sightseeing.
Overtourism is, of course, not just a first-world problem. Anyone who has travelled to popular tourist spots in India — be it the ghats of Benares, a hill station in the lower Himalayas, or the beaches of Goa — can attest to the seething mass of humanity that heaves and pulses in these places during peak holiday seasons. While a common tendency — as was the case in Catalonia — is to link vacationers to rising costs and overcrowding, the unregulated growth of the tourism industry can also have far sinister consequences.
In January 2023, the residents of Joshimath, a hill-town in Uttarakhand and part of revered pilgrimage routes, were shocked to see the walls of their houses cracking like wafers. Experts would later attribute these events to land subsidence or sinking, likely caused by rampant construction to profit from the ever-increasing number of visitors. The hotels and rest houses that had mushroomed on the mountainside now lie vacant or “blacklisted”. This, worryingly, is merely one instance of the hard economics of tourism endangering the fragile ecology of a scenic region.
An oft-quoted solution to tackle mass tourism is to levy higher travel fees — or, in other words, introduce price barriers. At first glance, this may appear to be a straightforward, perhaps even necessary, measure but it carries the whiff of privilege. For centuries, the lottery of birth allowed the aristocratic few to journey to exotic locations, to witness picturesque vistas far from their homes. We have come a long way since then and socio-economic progress has made travel more egalitarian. Pricing out certain sections of tourists from accessing popular venues, would be a backward step; it would portend a divisive and inequitable future for tourism.
There is no denying, however, that the status quo is in desperate need of change.
While the burden for resolving this prickly issue is rightly placed on administrators and officials, as tourists, we too, can help make things better. Adopting a philosophy of slow and responsible travel may be as good a place to start as any.
Slow travel is an amorphous phrase that eludes a concrete definition. In the digital landscape, it is often reduced to a hashtag, which, paradoxically, is precisely what it hopes to refute. Slow travel is not so much about the number of your vacation days, but where and how you choose to spend them. It eschews the idea of quickfire sightseeing for a more immersive experience in a new setting. With overtourism fast becoming a bane for travellers and locals alike, a move towards slow travel — especially for those with the means and the ability — can offer notable benefits.
Taking the road less travelled can introduce you to sights outside of the ordinary, places that retain the charm of not having become desktop wallpapers. As Pico Iyer wrote in his book Falling Off The Map, “Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveller seeks out places that every traveller has missed.” That is the promise slow travel holds. And the added bonus of being able to eat your paella in peace, without the looming fear of being squirted with a water gun.
The writer is a Mumbai-based lawyer
