Features

Tourism’s dark side

Visits to prisons, cemeteries and serial killer tours are growing in popularity, and raising questions about finding the balance between entertainment and respect

“We’re not strange, we simply like history, we’re curious and we like to see for ourselves”

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.”

Fea­ture Leisure

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