I’m on my second day of traveling around for a bit, and my first stop is Barcelona. I’m staying in a hostel right off La Rambla, one of the more famous streets in Barcelona, in the relatively modern district of Eixample.
As I spend more time traveling, I’m becoming increasingly wary of the effect of tourism on an area’s culture, especially when I walk down La Rambla, which is highly commercialized and geared almost solely to tourists. While tourism is a plus for the economy of an area, I’m worried about the effects on the development of the local culture, as well as how that culture is portrayed to the outside world.
What are the advantages of tourism?
• Local economic development. An area with tourism will enjoy a larger population of people going in and out, and therefore restaurants, souvenir shops, museums, tour groups, and like parties will contribute to the development of the local economy.
• Travel is enjoyable. On a more personal level, travel offers different perspectives on cultures and living, which is, in my experience, an incredibly important and rewarding, and even essential to living a full life. Exposing yourself to other ways of living allows you to gain perspective on how you live, and the advantages and disadvantages of your way of living, among many other effects.
• Increased culture awareness. Exposing outsiders to a culture allows more of the world to know about and appreciate a culture, which can be seen as good for both the people that the culture is associated with, as well as others for the perspective-expanding as explained earlier.
However, there are also many problems with tourism:
• Commercial noise. As an area is becoing more heavily toured, the interests of an area move away from its original culture, towards more commercial interests, creating commercial noise. As tourism increases, and the number of tourists in an area increases, there is more development on commercial interests catering to the tourists themselves, detracting from the original culture of the area. Souvenir shops, tour buses, and similar tourist-focused businesses infiltrate the area. More drastic examples include the destruction of natural or ancient areas for large-scale development, like this example of a Hawaiian condominium development.
• Interfering with the development of the culture. As a result of commercial noise, but also as a result of the presence of a large number of tourists in an area, the culture of the area changes dramatically. Instead of a place where others are living and building businesses for others living in the same area, La Rambla is more frequently a destination for outsiders to experience and enjoy, interfering with the development of a local culture.
• Culture dilution. While the development of the culture might happen in an area, another issue with the commercialization of a culture is the actual message of the commoditized culture. In an article entitled Tourism’s Negative Impact on Native Hawaiians, Kaleo Patterson, a native Hawaiian and a member of committees related to closer scrutiny of tourism and its effects, explains this in a succint way:
It becomes the selling of an artificial cultural image that has complete disregard for the truth, at the expense and pain of Native Hawaiians who are struggling to survive. From printed brochure to life in the fast lane, tourism promotes the development and practice of an entertainment and visitor oriented culture. The follow-through with marketing and promotion is part and parcel of the “plastic tikis, Kodak hula, and concrete waterfalls”.
...I am able to say with some certainty that the majority of Hawaiians long for a better way of life, one that is filled with the simple respect and dignity that today’s tourism industry can never come close to offering.
I’m not sure what exactly to think about the ethics of tourism. During my brief one-year stint as a New Yorker, I both appreciated and detested the huge role of tourism in the city—appreciated from a “well, I travel too” perspective, and detested from a quality-of-life perspective. I wonder what the natives of an area think of tourism and what they perceive as its effect on their culture, and whether they wish that tourism never touched their once-unknown part of the world.