Tourism’s dark side

Let’s shine a light on the dark­ness is the well-known slo­gan of TV3’s true crime pro­gramme Crims. The suc­cess of the se­ries re­flects the pub­lic’s ap­petite for the grisly de­tails of crimes and the darker side of life. Along with TV pro­grammes and pod­casts, there have also been a spate of books on the sub­ject, such as True crime. La fasci­nación del mal (Ariel, 2021), by the Va­len­cian crim­i­nol­o­gist Vi­cente Gar­rido.

An­other ex­am­ple is the work of Barcelona jour­nal­ist Míriam del Río, who in 2019 pub­lished Tur­ismo dark. Des­ti­nos con os­curos mag­net­ismos (Fire­fly), and who re­cently brought out the se­quel Tur­ismo dark 2. Aún más dark (Luciérnaga, 2023). The two books offer al­most a hun­dred pro­pos­als for vis­its in the grow­ing seg­ment of dark tourism.

There are two Cata­lan sites in Del Río’s first book, Barcelona’s anatom­i­cal am­phithe­atre (in the Raval neigh­bour­hood) and the Hos­pi­tal del Tòrax in Ter­rassa, while the sec­ond book in­cludes the Hearse Mu­seum in Barcelona. The “even darker” of the book’s title is due to the in­clu­sion of pro­pos­als of­fer­ing a more ex­treme ex­pe­ri­ence, such as the pos­si­bil­ity of spend­ing a night as a pris­oner in the Lat­vian mil­i­tary prison in Karosta. Not all the vis­its go so far but they all offer ex­pe­ri­ences that are im­mer­sive and ed­u­ca­tional.

There is a fine line that sep­a­rates the thrill-seek­ing tourist from the cul­tur­ally-aware trav­eller. “It’s dif­fi­cult not to fall into mor­bid­ity. How­ever, if you treat it rig­or­ously and with re­spect, there is no place that you can­not visit. It’s true that there are peo­ple whose only in­ter­est is in the most macabre part. I can’t con­trol that but I can try to pro­mote a re­spon­si­ble type of tourism,” says Del Río.

“The feel­ing of not being in con­trol, of not know­ing what’s going on, draws us in. The darker a des­tiny, the more it at­tracts be­cause it is strange,” she adds, con­clud­ing: “We’re not strange, we sim­ply like his­tory, we’re cu­ri­ous and we like to see for our­selves.”

One branch of dark tourism is vis­it­ing pris­ons. Barcelona’s in­fa­mous Model prison re­ceived 261,000 vis­its be­tween Jan­u­ary 2018 and Jan­u­ary 2023, the first five years after it opened to the pub­lic. Ac­cord­ing to Pablo Díaz Luque, an eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor at Cat­alo­nia’s open uni­ver­sity, the UOC, dark tourism is on the rise: “There are tourists who feel mor­bidly at­tracted to vis­it­ing the sites of tragedies, but there are also those who cel­e­brate the re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion of iconic places, such as the Model prison,” he says.

The tourism sec­tor knows how to sat­isfy our de­sire for new ex­pe­ri­ences: “There are tourists who visit these dark sites to take a photo, to say ’I’ve been there!’ But there are also peo­ple with an in­ter­est in his­tory and human sto­ries,” he adds.

Why are we drawn to the dark side of life? Vi­cente Gar­rido ex­plains: “For two mil­lion years - apart from the last 10,000, when so­ci­ety has ex­isted - our sur­vival de­pended on know­ing how to iden­tify threats from an­i­mals or other groups. In mod­ern so­ci­ety, we have re­placed that ex­pe­ri­ence with what we could call the fear game: watch­ing scary things from a po­si­tion of safety teaches us how to man­age the anx­i­ety we would feel if our lives were in dan­ger. As this is pre­sent in all cul­tures, the only ex­pla­na­tion is that it’s in our genes. This is the im­pulse be­hind crime-re­lated tourism. Vis­it­ing dark places is a way of learn­ing vic­ar­i­ously. And it’s fun, as our phys­i­ol­ogy re­wards us with en­dor­phins, dopamine... Ex­pe­ri­enc­ing sim­u­lated risk is re­ward­ing. That’s also the rea­son why peo­ple like ex­treme sports or get­ting scared on a roller coaster.”