Cerrado por vacaciones. Retratos de un vacío turístico

Abstract

The notion of emptiness/vacuum has been one of the most frequently used to refer to the situation of the streets and tourist attractions during the first year of the COVID-19 containment measures. The absence of tourists and the closure of businesses targeting this type of clientele, led to completely unique images of Barcelona city which for decades has been accustomed to withstanding the disproportionate pressure of tourism on its streets. This text presents the results of Closed for holidays. Portraits of a tourist vacuum, an experimental project that set out to gather images of Barcelona without tourists to analyze to what extent this vacuum was real or, on the contrary, a social universe had emerged from it, usually buried under the city's tourist organization planning. The results confirmed the space to be a social construct and its tourist exploitation as a dynamic force that, when it ceases, allows for a glimpse of how that same space could be built in a different way, less commercialized and closer to resident user values.