Touristdipity

After two years of touris­tic drought, Barcelona is once again flooded with sum­mer hol­i­day­mak­ers. Tourism was, orig­i­nally, a phe­nom­e­non cre­ated by the chin­less won­ders of the Eng­lish mid­dle classes in the early 19th cen­tury, which is why there is a ‘Prom­e­nade des Anglais’ in Nice, and a ‘Hotel Ma­jes­tic’ in Barcelona. But it wasn’t until 1855, when one Thomas Cook hit on the idea of or­gan­is­ing what he called ‘grand cir­cu­lar tours of Eu­rope’, that mod­ern tourism re­ally got going, with large num­bers of peo­ple vis­it­ing places they didn’t know from Adam for re­duced pe­ri­ods of time.

170 years later, there are now thirty clas­si­fied types of tourism en­joyed by mil­lions of peo­ple all over the world, from grief tourism and pop-cul­ture tourism through to culi­nary tourism and agri­tourism (which means spend­ing a week or so on a farm).

As al­ready men­tioned, Covid put paid to the lot for twenty-four months or so, but now Covid is con­sid­ered to be lit­tle more than a rum­bus­tious form of ‘flu, tourists of all vari­ants are back with a vengeance.

You get to for­get what it’s like to have the cen­tral part of the city over­run by yearn­ing glo­be­trot­ters, but the other day, when going into a metro sta­tion next to the Sagrada Família, I couldn’t help notic­ing that I was un­able to reach the ticket bar­ri­ers be­cause a large crowd of peo­ple were block­ing the way, ap­par­ently un­able to get through said bar­ri­ers. When I got closer, I saw that the prob­lem was that they were putting their tick­ets in the slots and then try­ing to get through the bar­ri­ers to the left of the slots in­stead of the ones to the right. Again and again they tried, like un­suc­cess­ful lem­mings, slam­ming their stom­achs into bar­ri­ers which, for ob­vi­ous rea­sons, re­mained in­tran­si­gent.

Now it is cer­tainly pos­si­ble, if not prob­a­ble, that in the metro sta­tions in all the many dif­fer­ent coun­tries these peo­ple came from, you have to go through the bar­ri­ers to the left of the ticket slots. But even so, it seemed odd that not a sin­gle sight­seer had spot­ted the signs stuck on each Barcelo­nan bar­rier which showed a large black arrow point­ing to the right, with in­struc­tions in three lan­guages, in­clud­ing Eng­lish, that that is where they were sup­posed to go.

Their be­hav­iour sud­denly brought back pre-Covid mem­o­ries of other ex­am­ples of touris­tic be­hav­iour: walk­ing along Barcelona’s cen­tral streets in biki­nis and swim­ming trunks; strolling five in a row at a pace which would have made a tor­toise look nim­ble on thor­ough­fares which were clearly also being used by busy, hur­ried, work­ing cit­i­zens; proof­lessly as­sum­ing they were being hood­winked every time they bought a drink or a sand­wich; buy­ing things they didn’t need at prices they couldn’t af­ford; sys­tem­at­i­cally call­ing every waiter Manolo...

Was it pos­si­ble, I won­dered, that tourism af­fected peo­ple’s IQs? That the sim­ple fact of stay­ing in a hotel and wan­der­ing around an un­known city made them lose their men­tal edge?

Ac­cord­ing to the Daily Tele­graph and the BBC, that is ex­actly the case. Their source is a well-known Ger­man psy­chol­o­gist, Siegfried Lehrl, whose stud­ies have shown that a re­laxed hol­i­day in a warm coun­try can re­duce brain cell vol­ume by up to 15%. The good news, he adds, is that brain ac­tiv­ity re­turns to nor­mal after a few days at home. Which re­ally is good news for me, as that’s where I spend every sin­gle hol­i­day of the year, every year, for ever and ever. Amen.