Mobile natures: tourism, symbolic geographies, and environmental protection on the Croatian Adriatic

Abstract

This article analyzes shifts in the imagining of the eastern Adriatic from a backward periphery to a natural paradise, a process of symbolic definition in which mobile tourists have both played a key role. Examining discourses and practices of nature tourism on the island of Lošinj, the analysis focuses on the emergence of the dolphin as a key symbol in the island's contemporary tourist iconography and infrastructure. In what ways does the marketing of dolphins repackage the image of Lošinj as a site of health and nature that helped spread the island's fame as a tourist mecca over a century earlier? How does the interest in dolphins refract the global rise since the 1990s of tourism promising unmediated contact with ‘wild nature’? How to explain the paradoxical embrace of dolphins as an island symbol alongside the failure of recent efforts to establish a marine protected area (MPA) that would conserve the dolphin habitat? In answering these questions, the article inquires into the historical erasures and shifting boundaries of center/periphery required to sustain the vision of Lošinj as an isolated and unspoiled place. Simultaneously, political contests over dolphins encode anxieties about the island's future as a periphery within the European Union.