The holy city of holidays: Seven theses on the touristification of Spain

Abstract

This paper analyses the notion of the ‘city of holidays’ in Spain by means of seven theses. Analysed as a transhistorical construction, valid to narrate the cultural history of modern tourism, the ‘city of vacations’ represents the symbiosis of a constructive model, a nationalist and religious imaginary, and an urban device of patrimonial origin. This construction defines the Spanish tourist paradigm, seen in the long-term, as it constitutes a recurrent- and mutant- fantasy that accompanies the economic and social Modernity associated with tourist development. Although the triumph of the Francoist Spanish vacation model is celebrated in the sixties, it has a much earlier genealogy, which takes us back to the foundational imaginaries of national-Catholicism and its ceremonial places. Born from the romantic discourses of the Restoration, linked to the neo-Catholic sanctuaries, the ‘city of vacations’ reemerges after the Civil War as a central part of the patrimonial discourse of the new Regime. There, the accumulation of capital at the base of the so-called ‘tourist miracle’ comes directly from the violence of Franco’s repression, including slave labour. At the same time, this model responds to the new economic logics of the Cold War framework, where the ecological and environmental cost of this urban model of development, based on itinerancy and mass-circulation, is dissolved. The celebration of the contemporary identity of today’s Spain as a global tourist power is carried out at the expense of this violent genealogy, even though such an identity is probably unsustainable in the eco-energetic and social horizon to which we are collectively heading.