by Richard Farr
Beautiful, enchanting Andalucía! — but I probably shouldn’t say that. It’s one of my favorite places in the world and we got to spend the whole of March traveling there. We even spent a week in a town with fabulous food, glorious beaches and lashings of history that the international tourist trade seems largely to have missed, ————— .
Like many people before me, I fell in love with Andalucía because of the bull who wouldn’t fight. My mother read the story over and over, slowing dramatically when she got to her favorite lines:
“Once upon a time in Spain. There was a little bull. And his name. Was….”
“One day, five men came. In very. Funny. Hats.”
“And the Banderilleros were afraid of him. And the Picadores were afraid of him. And the Matador was. Scared stiff.”
I have heard Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand described as the only great work of literature composed in under an hour. That last part is surely an exaggeration; on the other hand ‘great literature’ seems to me not far off the mark, but perhaps I’m biased by knowing that these elegiac, funny, moving and geometrically perfect few dozen words about loving peace and refusing violence were written in 1936 and brought the Falangists out in a rash. (Franco banned the book. Hitler described it as degenerate. Why can you never find a Nobel Prize Committee when you need one?) On the other hand, the words would be far less memorable without the simplicity and wit of Robert Lawson’s drawings, with their magical evocation of heat and silence, their gimlet eye for comic detail. Has any book ever had text and drawings in more perfect symbiosis?
Ferdinand is a peaceful bull mistaken for a fierce one. They put him in a wooden cart to take him to Madrid for the bullfights. You can place one of the illustrations exactly: the cart is trundling along what will become the Carretera de los Molinos, past the exact spot that is now Mirador la Hoya del Tajo, a convenient place to park your rental car and take a picture under Ronda’s Puente Nuevo. The next page is less easy to pinpoint. The story suggests this is part of Ferdinand’s triumphant arrival in Madrid, but the scene of people celebrating in a steep narrow street is surely taken from Lawson’s memories of the pueblos blancos further south — Arcos de la Frontera perhaps, or Olvera or Zahara.
Like Ronda, most of those villages are in or around the Sierra de Grazalema, the rugged limestone mountain range that was probably Ferdinand’s home. The peaks there are wrapped to the shoulders with forests of alcornoques, the cork oaks in the shade of which he “liked to sit just quietly… and smell the flowers.” Hiking one day, on a narrow path between outcrops not far from the village of Grazalema itself, we came face-to-face with one of his descendants, a toro as muscular and alarming as the original. Like Ferdinand, though, this great animal was shy, polite and a born pacifist. When we approached he looked down bashfully and moved away into the shade.
The population here is mainly cattle and sheep. We met a few other hikers, but most were locals and almost none of them were foreign tourists.
You’d absolutely hate it.
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My wife and I first traveled to southern Spain over thirty years ago. By chance we landed in Seville in the middle of an event that would later become famous, or infamous, the 1992 International Expo marking the 500th anniversary of Columbus arriving in, you know, India. The city was besieged in a way that must have seemed shocking, but what the Sevillanos didn’t know was that they would never again be unbesieged. No internet back then, no Booking.com or Vrbo or Airbnb, but the 1992 Expo is widely credited as the turning point at which their city started its transformation from a destination of some significant interest into a poster child of the current Tourist Apocalypse.
Notes from merely the European end of the field: most Venetians have not lived in Venice for decades and now they are charging the twenty million annual day-trippers a €5 entry fee, thus finally admitting that “Venice” is no longer the name of a city but only of a theme park. In Málaga, a campaign against the spread of short-term rentals has gone viral, the official blue Apartamento Touristico (“AT”) stickers being altered to read AnTes Una Familia Vivía Aquí (“a family used to live here”). In Barcelona, the graffiti reads tourists go home.
In Rome they can’t keep up with the physical damage, much less the Yahoo-on-a-bender rudeness that has always been tourism’s unpleasantly protruding midriff. Also in Rome: they make you buy a ticket online to get into the Galleria Borghese, and the ticket gives you exactly two hours before you’re kicked out — which seems reasonable, given the crowds, or anyway it seems reasonable until you’re standing in front of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne or The Abduction of Prosperina and are knocked so senseless with awe that you want to give them each the full two hours before even glancing at anything else. And again in Rome: I had very much wanted to see the Pietà at last, but it was more or less impossible. Not because of the bulletproof glass, but because the inside of St. Peter’s was like the mosh pit at a thrash metal concert and the view of Michelangelo’s infinitely delicate masterpiece — from which Gian Lorenzo B. learned so much — was obscured by a pullulating mass of Insta-bandits, shrieking and grinning and jostling under a forest of selfie sticks.
(Parenthetical remark on inappropriate behavior. When you’re trying to learn a language and a culture there is nothing more interesting than the bits that don’t quite translate. In Spain I took great delight in being reminded that maleducado doesn’t mean “lacking in book education” so much as “rude” or “uncouth.” This strikes me as having interesting philosophical, ethical and pedagogical implications — a line of thought I don’t know how to develop without dragging in Aristotle, so I’ll close the curtain and move on.)
Notice one more thing about the attractions of a “cheap” southern Europe stuffed to the gills with interlopers. Across the continent, golden visa programs are being curtailed or canceled. These lifetime welcomes to well-heeled foreigners were an indispensable cash cow during the financial crisis, but a simple truth has at last dawned on the pols: golden visas are just tourism on amphetamines and they have grossly accelerated an already massive rise in economic inequality and social dislocation. Nowhere is the effect worse than in Portugal; while average incomes remain barely half the European average, Lisbon has become one of the most expensive capitals on the continent. Young people who can no longer afford their own city, or country, are fleeing en masse, threatening the economy on which welfare for the elderly — and, ultimately, the stability of democracy — depends.
There, as in Spain and Greece and Italy — and for that matter on Maui, and at the summit of Everest — hordes of foreigners waving credit cards are a very mixed blessing.
But that wasn’t going to stop me going to Córdoba.
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Córdoba was the only major city in the south of Spain I’d never visited. There are places where you can scarcely move without stubbing your toe on a World Heritage Site, but in Córdoba they’ve taken it one step further by making the entire center of the city a World Heritage Site. At the center of this center stands the Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, better known as the Mezquita.
By any measure it’s one of the most astonishing buildings in the world. It began life as a mosque in 785, was repeatedly and enthusiastically expanded under the Umayyads until about 1010, was plundered and left to rot and then turned into a cathedral and then back into a mosque in the 1100s, and then rededicated as a cathedral in 1236. In a series of changes and restorations running from about 1370 into the 1800s part of it was turned into a bigger and much more elaborate cathedral — with, mirabile dictu, the destruction of only parts of the mosque.
The day we arrived a few brightly colored tour buses were hovering on the periphery, like dragonflies orbiting a peach. But my wife discovered that you could get in for free, for an hour, if you dragged yourself out of bed and showed up early enough. So next day we duly did, feeling not a little pleased with ourselves for being able to enjoy the sensation of having, as it were, wiped several decades off the tourist clock. When we were told that it was time to leave, “unless you are attending Mass,” we immediately discovered a compulsion to attend Mass. It took place at the very center of the labyrinth, with a dozen priests and two dozen congregants. In a chapel created in 1748. Among choir stalls more ornately carved than the mortal mind can grasp. Under a roof from 1607 that may have been built by God himself.
This was the shoulder season, a week before Easter. In the narrow streets, over the course of the next few days, you could sense the crowd pressure increasing — it was like being in a pot of soup that’s beginning to simmer. I felt both glad to be there early in the year and annoyed that the place was already so busy. Why wouldn’t these shuffling, gawking masses go home? Why wouldn’t they leave the place to sophisticated people like me? Me, who could really appreciate these things because I’d read, like, a whole book about Spain.
Travel is to snobbery as horse manure is to roses. Which has to be borne in mind, I think, as we ask what we are going to do about people who insist on renting cheap short-term apartments in foreign cities so that they can indulge their desire to wander around slack-jawed with wonder and delight – some of them even writing about the experience afterwards.
Circa 1750, when young English aristocrats were going south on the Tour in their carriages, with their chaperone-tutors and copies of Virgil, their money must have helped the local economies a bit without their presence doing much damage. Now tourism is a quarter of the entire economy in some of the more delectable cities, and has changed those cities dramatically. Few residents genuinely want all the tourists to go home, but nearly everyone willing to speak on the subject would like to pause, take a long deep breath, and find some way to disinter the affordable, livable cities they half remember.
It may be helpful to think of mass tourism as a version of what economists call the resource curse. Some places are rich in copper, cobalt, or chromium; others are rich in climate, castles, and cuteness. Either way they tend to be invaded and colonized and diminished by beady-eyed self-enrichers with money to spare. Some locals find new ways to do well out of the change. Others — local and not — find ways to do very, very well out of it. The latter especially are tempted to silence the inconvenient voices of the doubters.
Maybe those of us who love to travel should find ways to stand with the doubters. Tourists like to whine that they are being charged more than the locals; the obvious response to this is both No, you’re probably not and, on the other hand, What a good idea! Perhaps all we need is to expand the Venice strategy and make it universal: visitors to the great tourist destinations start paying a 33% tax on everything, and this is redistributed as a direct cash subsidy to long-term residents.
Also, while we’re at it, here’s another modest proposal. How about a sort of Temporary-Citizen Test: no entry unless you can first (a) answer correctly eight out of ten basic questions about the place you claim to be interested in visiting, (b) sign a declaration that you will avoid a list of potentially offensive behaviors, and (c) demonstrate that you’ve bothered to learn Hello and I’m sorry and Thank you for being so kind and patient – it must be such a pain dealing with all us foreign idiots.
These demands would put some tourists off. Es lo que es.
Ferdinand never wanted to go to the big city and see the sights. All he ever wanted was to sit in the shade, under his favorite cork tree, oliendo las flores tranquilamente.
Some places in Andalucía are still tranquil today. The less tranquil places are full of energy and beauty and life. But I think you’d prefer Chicago.
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You can order The Story of Ferdinand here, and Pura Belpre’s Spanish translation, El Cuento de Ferdinando, here.