September. The first day falls on a Monday. Welcome to routine. Goodbye, for a few months, to a disturbing image: that of single-file tourism. Who knows if, starting today, social media will stop flooding us with images of mile-long lines of people trying to reach a destination that, with few people, will be heavenly. In high season, on the other hand, reaching the finish line has been a test of patience, endurance, and, perhaps, human stupidity. Not a day has passed when we haven't seen videos of the caravan of cars stopped for hours trying to reach the port of Sóller. Sometimes the traffic jam extended far beyond the Caubet roundabout. To park in Positano and see the cascade of colorful houses hanging over the Amalfi coast, you must get up well before the sun. Otherwise, arriving by road is a tiresome, hopeless dream. In Santorini, tourists only see the sunsets, arranged one after the other, like a school queue that stretches on for hours. But not all picture-postcard paradises are in the Mediterranean. To get to Gaztelugatxe, and attempt to climb the 241 steps to the Hermitage of Sant Joan, it doesn't matter if you have a reservation. The problem, since the series Game of Thunder He filmed some impressive scenes, allowing you to access it without spending hours in endless traffic. You end up knowing every curve of the Basque coast by heart. At Mont Saint-Michel, the same. Or much worse. You can only get there during low tide and if you have a pre-reserved parking space. Once you've left the car, the photographs of the procession of tourists walking to the abbey are shocking. Overcrowding is this, a highly contagious disease that goes, in a flash, from an absurd vice to a morbid mania. As if, because it's so difficult to get there, we should like that corner of the world even more. On the contrary. Those of us who obsessively flee traffic jams already consider all these places worth visiting. Is it worth it? For a crowd, it seems so. For me, not at all.
At home, we call it the Cadaqués effect. An idyllic, rather eccentric place, located in a cul-de-sac on the map, where to enter you must first let someone out. These are places that were already picture-postcard-worthy long before Systrom and Krieger invented Instagram, fifteen years ago. They are picturesque places, with a thousand and one charms that, far from dying of success, will bore those who have already been there to death. The regulars of Sóller, Positano and Cadaqués become almost like fairground monkeys, a nuisance to the swarm of pedestrians who, from traffic jam to traffic jam, have every right to go on an excursion, eat some rice or take a picture in the street. golden hour to rub their happiness in our faces. There's no solution. While we all concentrate our vacations in the same two months, the flock will move through the same places on the same days. And we'll build more parking areas in the vicinity of these towns and let an algorithm mark which places we're missing from our collection. And once the caravan is over, back with the steering wheel warm, we'll double-click to verify that we've been there and that we can now die in peace. All those fears Stefan Zweig had when he wrote Trips A hundred years ago they have fallen far short. Now there is one car per family, the low cost It's been revolutionary, and social media has created a bunch of needs we didn't have before. Little by little, the difference between a traveler and a tourist has become significant. The traveler sees what they see; the tourist sees what they came to see. And that's it.
