Ramon Aymerich, La fábrica de turistes. El país que va canviar la indústria pel turisme [The tourist factory: the country that traded industry for tourism], 2021, 149 p.
publisher’s summary:
Catalonia is no longer a country of industry, but one of tourists.
The day that Barcelona was left without tourists [2020, Covid-19] felt strange to the locals, they were so used to them. During the last 60 years, tourism has changed the country’s appearance. It has urbanized half of the country, has damaged natural ressources, has transformed the economy and has created a lot of jobs… temporary jobs. Part of Catalonia’s identity was made up of industry, and now it is a country that fabricates tourists. During the pandemic we have discovered the cost of this bet, now full of uncertainties.
La fàbrica de turistes covers the creation of the myth of the Costa Brava, the birth of Port Aventura [amusement park], and the appearance of Barcelona as a big international tourist destination… and it stresses the urgency of finding a plan B for its economy.
This essay was written in the context of a noticeable deindustrialization of Catalonia: the carmaker Nissan announced the closure of its factories by the end of 2021, eliminating more than 3,000 jobs directly and potentially around 20,000 in supplier factories; one supplier, Bosch, followed suit with more than 600 lost jobs. The local authorities would like to have battery makers settle on the same premises and employ the old Nissan workers, but there are few viable projects; and other parts of (western) Spain and Portugal are closer to lithium deposits. The only company opening new warehouses all the time is Amazon. Jordi Amat in his review calls Aymerich’s essay a “small great book” and reminds readers of the fact that “tourism is the principal source of occupation for poorly qualified workers in the western world.”
This blogger was reminded of an entertaining novel he read a few months ago that gives quite a few stark examples of the negative impact of “low cost” mass tourism: Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, Grand Hotel Europa [2019].
This blog has got other posts on the problems of the Spanish tourism model (“sol y playa” [sun and beach]):
A social problem (July 2017), bad economics (September 2017), link to “AirBnB invasion” (April 2019), among others.
SOURCE: Pòrtic (Grup 62, Planeta; publisher); review in “Cultura/s,” La Vanguardia, 22 May 2021, p. 7 [printed edition]
literary rambles 