Should Foreign Tourism Be Discouraged?
Moral Maze
BBC
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 15 August 2024
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In recent weeks tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets in Spain’s most popular tourist destinations. From Málaga to Mallorca, Gran Canaria to Granada, locals are revolting against what they see as the hollowing out of their communities with the buying up of properties to turn them into short-stay holiday lets for people they argue don’t respect their locality, culture or language. UNESCO has described the situation as "totally out of balance".
On one level this is an argument about economics, but the implications are profoundly moral. People shouldn’t feel like second-class citizens in their own towns, but we also recognise the freedom to move, rest and discover. The affordability of travel makes mass tourism possible, but it’s lamented by those who see it as selfish, narcissistic and damaging to native cultures and the environment. And yet travel supposedly broadens the mind and the soul – a cultural exchange that can be a catalyst for self-improvement, make us more empathetic, and provide a livelihood for host communities.
Should foreign tourism be discouraged? Or if it’s mass tourism we’re worried about, what can we do about it without holidays becoming an elitist pursuit?
Producer: Dan Tierney Assistant producer: Ruth Purser
Panel: Giles Fraser Sonia Sodha Ash Sarkar Tim Stanley
Witnesses: Guillem Colom-Montero Jim Butcher Anna Hughes Emily Thomas
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | Good evening, the way the locals see it, tourism is the new plague. |
| 0:08.9 | Holiday hotspots all over Europe have been up in arms, |
| 0:12.0 | complaining at being swamped by visitors, |
| 0:14.8 | pricing them out of their homes, getting drunk, not respecting their culture. |
| 0:19.0 | In the Canaries, whose population of 2 million, plays host of 14 million holiday makers a year, |
| 0:25.0 | they carried banners saying, your paradise, our hell. |
| 0:28.8 | In Barcelona, they read, murdered by Airbnb, |
| 0:32.5 | and tourists were attacked with water pistols in the Ramblas. |
| 0:36.1 | Surveying the scene globally, UNESCO said tourism had got totally out of balance. |
| 0:41.8 | On one level, this is an argument about people who want to have their cake |
| 0:45.5 | but not have to serve it to Deirdre and her teenagers from Hartlepool. |
| 0:49.5 | On another, it's about the morality of travel, and particular mass tourism itself does it broaden or as |
| 0:56.2 | chesterton said narrow the mind does it build empathy and understanding or prejudice and resentment |
| 1:02.5 | is a desire to see the glories of the world to be applauded or regarded as an act of environmental |
| 1:08.4 | selfishness tinged with narcissism. And since nobody is complaining |
| 1:13.1 | about the upper crust art lover and is Bédica strolling to the Uffizi, it's the masses heading for |
| 1:18.6 | Malaga that's perceived as the problem, is this about snobbery? And would the supposed solutions |
| 1:24.0 | make travel once again the preserve of the elite. |
| 1:29.9 | The morality of tourism, that's our moral maze tonight. |
| 1:32.6 | The panel, Ash Sarko from the Navarro Media Group, |
| 1:34.9 | Sonia Soda, columnist on the Observer, |
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