I hope the geography community is enjoying their holiday. I am in Devon at the moment, by the River Exe.
I am doing a quick Twitter poll. Check my @GeoBlogs feed for details - apparently you can't embed a tweet with a poll in it on the trends in holiday locations this summer. We'll leave the debate over the misuse of the word 'staycation' to another post....
The pandemic has given some places a rest from the usual tourist hordes and recover a little from their footsteps and general pressure of tourism. Apparently the cloud forest has had a chance to recover from the usual hordes of visitors to Machu Picchu. Some cities, such as Prague and Barcelona are also rethinking their relationship with tourists as well, and recalculating the costs and benefits.
Machu Picchu has already introduced a system of quotas to restrict visitors both in terms of numbers, and also in terms of the time that they can spend exploring the old Inca city.
Coincidentally, I caught an old technocolour Charlton Heston film the other week, and there were some scenes filmed in Machu Picchu, well ahead of mass tourism, and it was wonderfully overgrown with vegetation compared to the more open nature of the city now, which exposes the buildings.
This Al Jazeera piece explores this issue, and uses the term extractive tourism.
This is a term I will be using with students in a proposed unit looking at the industry influenced by an excellent book I have been reading by Marco d'Eramo.
The slow return of tourism (compared to the sadly rapid return to mass car use) will be interesting to observe. One hopes for the sake of the planet that the air industry takes some time to return to pre-pandemic levels of flights....
Image: Teignmouth from Exmouth, Devon - by Alan Parkinson and shared under CC license
Comments