The awakening of tourism: the origins of tourism policy in Argentina, 1930–1943

Abstract

During the 1920s in Argentina, tourism came to be regarded as a matter of public policy as well as private interest. In the following decade such ideas spread widely in the press and public opinion and led to the construction of tourism as a state policy objective. This article focuses on early tourism policy, from the construction of roads to the creation of the National Parks Directorate, which is considered to be the first attempt at a comprehensive and centralised tourist policy; the attempts to create a national tourism organisation; and the early rehearsal of a popular tourism policy. Some of these initiatives failed, some succeeded; but this work argues that all of them represent a basic cornerstone for understanding the enthusiastic tourism policy implemented by the Peronist government from 1945 (and at least until 1950), which consisted largely of centralising and boosting the different fragments of tourist policy in the 1930s, organised now under the sole premise of the democratisation of tourism.